Summer Star Scrappy Sew Along: The Fun Begins

Several weeks ago, Diane Knott of Butterfly Threads Quilting queried her readers about their interest in a scrappy summer sew along.  At the time, I was trying to come up with a way to further decrease my blue scrap bin and I thought Diane's idea sounded interesting.  I decided to participate and started prepping a stack of blue scrappy strips.

Diane shared the first SAL step last week:  creating nine patch blocks with a variety of scraps.  The SAL directions call for using fabrics of all colors, but I'm planning to use only blue, white and cream.  These block components were made by sewing strips together and cutting them to the requisite size.  I pulled lots of pieces from my 2 1/2 inch strip bin - some short pieces and some long pieces.  Using smaller pieces made the block component creation take a little longer, but I was happy to be using up lots of scraps!

I've pieced about half of the required 48 nine patch blocks so far.  It was hard for me to piece the nine patch blocks randomly, instead of in the traditional dark and light patterns.  I knew the fabrics would need to have some contrast, otherwise the blocks would end up looking like mush.  I may go back and cut some more strips to add a little more contrast and fabric variety to the mix.

Diane is sponsoring a weekly link-up on Sundays so participants can share their progress.  I can't wait to see what scrappy colors and fabrics other quilters will be using!