Using up Batting Scraps

Do you save the pieces of batting that you trim off of quilts after they are quilted?  I do.  I don't like to waste anything and batting costs money just like everything else.  Using up the scraps on smaller quilts and projects just makes good fiscal sense in my opinion (that's the former accountant in me) and gives me more money to spend on new fabric.  Not that I need any new fabric, but that doesn't really matter, does it?  LOL

If you do save those scraps, then you probably find the pile growing faster than you can deplete it. Maybe you are like me and get in a rush so you just grab a new piece of batting rather than taking the time to piece together some of those scraps.  So they continue to pile up.  I keep mine in a large basket and also have a smaller basket where I keep narrower batting scraps that I use for making potholders, mug rugs and trivets out of orphan blocks.

The large basket was overflowing and I had a pile of small projects needing to be quilted, so today I have been using the batting from that basket for them, piecing them together as needed.  These orphan blocks are now basted and ready for quilting.

Can you see how I stitched two pieces of batting together for the large block?  Look about half way down and you will see the zig zag running horizontally.

It is super easy to piece batting.  First, I lay out the rough pieces that I need based on the size of the quilt backing.  Then I lay 2 pieces on top of each other that need to be stitched together.  I make a clean, straight cut along the side where they will meet.  Then I use a wide zig zag stitch with a longer stitch length to sew them together.

This batting for one of my small quilts is made up of 4 pieces sewn together.  I had one large piece, but it wasn't wide enough so I pieced together three smaller pieces to make another segment that was then sewn to the original large piece.  As long as you use a wide zig zag you shouldn't get bunching along the joining seam.  The 4 piece batting below is relatively flat in person.  I'm not sure why it looks so puffy in the picture.  I do a quick press with a hot iron which also helps keep the batting flat and the picture may have been before that final press.  PLEASE NOTE - I am using 100% cotton batting or mostly cotton batting in these examples.  Poly batting will need a much cooler iron or it will melt.

The quilt with the 4 piece batting isn't basted yet, but these two are and both battings are made up of scraps I pieced together.  If you look close, you can see that the pink and green quilt batting is made up of three pieces.  I do make sure that the join doesn't fall under a light section of the quilt like the very light sashing on this quilt.  After all of this basting, the basket is still overflowing, but at least it has gone down a bit!

Recycled Afghan Project in Progress

A few months ago I posted about recycling the yarn from various afghans.  The first one I started with was one that I had made quite a few years ago.  This is the afghan before I took it apart:

When I needed something mindless to work on over the last few months, I pulled out the balls of yarn from this afghan and have been making these 11 x 11 inch squares.  My tentative plan is to sew them together into a rug.  The crocheting is very tight so the squares are pretty sturdy and I think could hold up fairly well as a decorative rug. 

Here are the five squares I've completed so far along with the current balls of yarn I'm working with.  I believe I got about 14 large balls from the afghan:

And here is a closeup of a couple of the blocks.  I just weave in the next color when I run out of the previous one and then trim the ends once the block is done.  I'm using different balls of yarn at the same time to make sure I have enough variety of color in each block.  I'm not real pleased with the one that ended up with so much white, but I'm hoping that if I put it between blocks with only a small amount of white, that it will balance out.

I've been lax lately about taking pictures of the felines, but I did get a couple recently.  Here's miss princess (Sassy) surveying her kingdom from atop the plant shelf.



And poor Echo.  Maya decided that he needed a bath again yesterday *sigh*.  She is very thorough and he is very tolerant except if she tries to wash his private parts LOL.  Yesterday she just licked and licked and licked for about five minutes before he got tired of it and walked away.  She just followed him and started up again LOL.

 











Afghan for Nephew's New Baby

One of our nephew's on DH's side of the family had a new baby on July 10th.  Ok, he didn't have the baby, his significant other did, but you probably already figured that out.  By the time I found out when the baby was due, I didn't have much time to come up with a gift.  The first plan I came up with involved using a large piece of children's flannel from my stash, cutting it exactly in half and using half for the front and half for the back.  By doing do, the quilt ended up just the right size for a baby and I had an easy to make gift.

After I got the quilting done on the quilt, I ran across this afghan at the thrift store.  I had a coupon for 30% off, which made the price about $1.50.  Can you believe it?  $1.50!!!  It is in perfect condition and much more appropriate right now for a summer baby.  So I snapped it up and both Dawn and I thoroughly examined it to make sure it was indeed gift worthy.  I ran it through the wash and it's been wrapped and mailed and is on the way to it's recipients.

Here is the full afghan:

 And here's a close-up of the pattern and yarn.  It's really pretty in person.

It is kind of depressing to see items like this end up in a thrift store after someone put so much work into it, but I'm glad I was able to rescue it and hopefully give it to a good home, provided the parents like it and will use it.

Oh, and I had an unplanned break to my work the other day. 

Why, you ask? 

Well, it could have been this that did it:

You could never accuse Echo of not getting comfortable wherever he's at.  I know sooner snapped the picture when he suddenly rolled into the cup full of pens, etc., behind him, which of course tipped over hitting all of the other junk around it on my desk (yes, my desk is very messy right now), and startling him into full awakeness, which of course knocked more things over and off the desk.  He's such a dork sometimes :-).

Recycling Afghans & Kitty Convention

I mentioned in my catchup post that I'd bought some afghans recently from the thrift store in order to recycle the yarn.  Before I ever bought any afghans, I recycled one of my own.  I had most of it torn apart before vacation, but had a few squares to finish when I got back.

Here's what the afghan looked like before.  This afghan was made by me long before I was a quilter and it got a lot of use.  I really liked the pattern I made up, but it was coming apart in a number of places and needed more repairs than I was willing to do.  I decided that recycling the yarn to make cat mats or a new scrap afghan would be the best use of it at this point.

And a close-up of the block pattern:

And here's what I had after everything had been torn apart:

Rather than wash all of this yarn to get the kinks out, I spent a lot of my TV watching time last week winding it into numerous larger balls that should relax the kinks if left that way for awhile.  I didn't tie the yarn together like I did for the cotton yarn scraps I wound into a ball because I don't yet know what I'm going to do with this yarn and if I do anything other than my cat mat pattern, I don't want knots because there will be nowhere to hide them.  I ended up 14, four inch diameter balls of yarn from the pile of scraps above.  That is quite a lot of yarn that I now have to use for something else and it didn't cost me a dime!

Now on to the kitty convention.  I walked into our bathroom last night and this is what I found going on in the separate toilet room.  I've never found all three of them in there at the same time.

I'm assuming they were looking for bugs, crickets, etc. to play with.  It's also scorpion season here and so far the score is Cats - 4, Laura - 2, and Scorpions - 0.  Sassy has found two and Echo and Tyrone have each found one.  Of course we don't let them play with them or try to kill them themselves, but they are really good at spotting them for us so we can arrive with a shoe to take them out.  We seem to get quite a lot of the crickets, scorpions, etc. in the area of this bathroom and I think they come in through the vents and are attracted to the water.  Tyrone is always staring at the ceiling near the vents in either the toilet room or the master bathroom, so I'm guessing it's because he sees stuff come out.