A Blessing or a Curse?

About 12 days ago, a little sprite (whether angelic or demonic is yet to be determined) delivered into my hands 6 heavily-laden garbage bags.  A gift!  Yes.  A gift.  A gift comprised of........oh........I'd say about..... TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND pieces of fabric!!!  

I had to make a choice.  1) Promptly remove said bags to my sewing room where they would be out of my way...and would likely remain unopened and unexplored for 5-6 years.  2) Promptly carry said bags to my car and deliver them to someone else's doorstep to be dealt with by THEM.   3) Promptly dump contents of said bags onto my living room floor to sort through immediately. 

Because it is Christmas time, and wrestling season, I have nothing at all to do, so I wisely chose..........you guessed it!  OPTION #3!!  Which is why, 12 days later, my house still looks like THIS:

We have no Christmas tree.  No Christmas lights.  No Christmas presents.  No figgy pudding.  But all is not lost!  Afterall, WE HAVE FABRIC!!  I must be at least halfway through sorting, organizing and eliminating fabrics I'll never use.  I have cut hundreds of quilt squares for future use.  And, I might add, I have completed my first...and perhaps last...project from this lovely assortment of scraps.  Here it is:

Why is it when I get a hankerin' to sew, I make PINK things?  I'm not exactly a girly girl.  Ah, another of life's great mysteries: tough girl likes pink.  Hmmm.

You'll excuse me now while I go wade through the remaining 11,000 pieces of fabric?  See you when I come up for air in a two weeks...just in time to throw up a tree and celebrate Christmas!

24-Hour Rag Quilt

Every now and then I get a hankerin'.  Do you ever get one of those?  My most recent was a hankerin' to sew.  For several years of my life, when the boys were young, I sewed EVERY SINGLE DAY.  It was my sole creative outlet and the one part of my daily work that no one could "undo" as soon as I had done it.  It brought the satisfaction of a visible, tangible, finished product...something we moms of young ones often miss out on.  As the boys have grown up and I, in many respects, have more free time than ever before, I have nearly abandoned all creative outlets...probably because I have focused almost exclusively on writing.  Anyway...here is the project I began and completed in fewer than 24 hours!

I started with this stack of storebought flannel baby blankets which I have accumulated over the past 4 years in anticipation of this project:

Using these highly sophisticated tools: (cookbook, pencil and scissors)

I marked and cut out 84 squares:

Which I then laid out in my preferred pattern: (Blogger insists on rotating this photo...awkward...sorry!)

I failed to take a photo of this next step, but each "block" requires 2 squares of identical fabric which are placed back to back (wrong sides together) so that both sides of the quilt end up with a "finished" look.  I chose to sew each block's front and back together with an "X" pattern - on the machine with a stitch length of 5 - before I did anything else.  This step is not necessary for the end product to work...it was my own little variation, so feel free to skip it!

Next, I sewed 7 rows of 6 blocks each, then attached the 7 rows together.  On this type of quilt, all the seams are exposed!  You need to use a fairly small stitch so that your seams are very strong!

Seams need to be strong, because the next step is to clip every single seam down to the stitching at 1/8" - 1/4" intervals, like this: (I wish I had done mine slightly closer than I did for a better fray!)

Of course, make every effort NOT to clip through any of your seams...but if you do, it's not the end of the world...you'll have to make a simple repair, that's all.

Your final step is to launder the quilt!  (I forgot to mention that you MUST NOT launder your flannel beforehand or this will not work well!!)  After you wash your new quilt, I suggest taking it outside and shaking it vigorously to rid it of many of the loose fibers from your "shredded" seams.  Then dry the quilt in the dryer, checking every 15 minutes or so for excess build-up in the lint filter. 

When the quilt has dried completely...DO IT AGAIN!  You want those seams to be as frayed as possible and each washing increases the fluffiness of the seams.  Your end product should look something like this:

This is one of the easiest projects I've done and I was pleasantly surprised at how little time it required start-to-finish!  Try it...you'll like it!