Half the Scraps

I’ve made another quilt as part of my quilting ‘stretch’ project using the block from Sherri at A Quilting Life’s mystery block a month. As I said then I don’t know if I’ll manage to make a quilt a month, but I won’t really know unless I try…

What I’ve learnt generally from this ‘stretch’ project is that while I’m using lots of fabric from my stash, I’ve also got a fair bit which remains from these projects which is already cut to the widths I’m generally using. So my plan for this quilt was to use up ‘all the scraps’ and to be ok with random fabric and pattern piecing.

My ninth charity quilt

So while my plan was to use ‘all the scraps’ in reality that didn’t work - not only was there more than I could use in my latest four block quilt, some of the colours jarred. So hence this quilt’s name of Half the Scraps!

I’m sure you’ll recognise at least some of the fabrics I settled on - in fact, they’ve all been used in previous quilts. Some as recently as last month, and at least one from way back at the start of the year.

The block itself was a churn dash, which I wasn’t sure about at all when I first saw it. I’ve not sewn one before, but actually now with five under my belt I can see the attraction.

Making the test blocks helps me understand how they go together, but also it helps show which colour placements are most successful, or which I like the most in any case. And this month it was the lower right block that worked best for me with it’s darker triangular corners, so that’s something I noted for my own Mystery Block quilt - come back tomorrow to see how that one went!

Adding the borders

As my aim was to use up the material strips I had left from earlier quilts, my plan was to embrace random log cabin borders - but within reason. I decided to still split the fabrics into two groups and try to keep them in the same half of the borders. I managed it pretty well for the green and peach striped fabric (an old summer shirt of MOH’s), but with less of some of the other patterns it was definitely more random.

I needed to twirl some of the blocks around to get a layout that worked for my eye, and so that the dominant pink ‘patchwork’ material (an old duvet cover) was more evenly spread.

But still I felt it wasn’t quite right.

I had no idea what colour final border to add. But then I remembered I was doing random, and so the final border could also comprise more than one fabric. And that helped a lot. On the pinker edges I used a paler fabric, and on the paler edges I used a new multicoloured pink fabric which came from mum’s stash.

It’s also the fabric that I’ve used on the reverse of the quilt, so it fits in with this month’s ethos of using what I had cut. More so actually as the strips leftover from the backing piece haven ‘t even made it into the scrap stash pile!

Now that it’s finished I’m much happier with it, but during its construction I was less sure. I also tried a different way of quilting this one - and well, I learnt why most quilts aren’t quilted in circles! It’s hard and the material on the back wants to pucker up more than normal. It’s not something I’ll be trying again for a long while, that’s for sure!

You can see my other quilts which I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets, including those that are part of this ‘stretch’ project in earlier posts. I’m aiming to publish an update on my progress in the last week of each month for the remainder of 2025.

Post Comment Love 5 - 7 September

Hello there, and welcome to this week’s #PoCoLo - a relaxed, friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any blog post published in the last week. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked, comment and share some of that love.

Please don’t link up posts which are older as they will be removed, and if you see older posts are linked then please don’t feel that it’s necessary to comment on those. If you were here last week it was great to have you along, if you’re new here we’re pleased you’ve joined us.

Well hello September! Already!

I’m sure it comes around more quickly these days, and I was just getting the hang of August-ing. We finished the month with a visit to a local tropical garden here in Nottinghamshire, which isn’t a normal place for a tropical garden. But it was magical, and my photo this week is looking up through the monkey puzzle tree, which are always a favourite, and one that’s easy to spot!

Have a great week.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

My garden in August

Last month there was plenty of blooms and gardening activity, this month less of that but more of moving pots about and some changes to our garden furniture too. But first, let me share the flowering succulent in all its glory…

It’s great isn’t it? But that’s not all - look at how blue the flowering globe thistles got. Hopefully there’ll be plenty more flowers on this one next year.

August was also the month I finally tackled the new pot and the new olive tree. It’s a big pot, and the olive tree isn’t so big - I mean, it will grow, slowly and will eventually adapt to its new home. It was very reasonably priced at £32 - we looked at many olive trees, and many had much higher price tags.

I was keen to get the pot feet stuck on the pot before we started to put anything inside it. These silicone pot feet are great, but even with fairly big pots they do move a bit, and I didn’t want that to happen with this one, so out came the glue. The other thing I was keen to do before we filled the pot was to check it’s position was right.

And check things like, could MOH cut and edge the grass without moving the pot; what did it look like from inside the house, and obviously from the patio, as well as other key points in the garden. We got there, slower than MOH would like, but this pot is going to be heavy when it’s full and we aren’t going to be moving it much!

I’ll share another post on planting up the olive tree - but we took a couple of days to fill the pot too, as I was keen to see if the levels changed as the compost settled in. It didn’t really, but we didn’t know that.

There’s been a few new additions to the garden this month, including these vintage metal storage boxes which we picked up from the Rutland Flower Show. Even MOH liked them, which is something - slowly I’m winning him over to the mix of new and vintage items! The plan is for these to provide functional but attractive storage in the greenhouse, yes the one I don’t yet have!

I also picked up these Victorian terracotta pots at the Rutland Flower Show. These are bigger than the small flower pot type ones I already have, but not as big as those I use elsewhere in the garden, so size-wise they’re a good addition to my stock. They don’t necessarily help solve my pot crisis, but as they say every little helps.

This month we also said goodbye to our much loved and much used in London but not here sun loungers. They’ve had a good life with us, and we’ve enjoyed having them in our lives but it was time to let them go via the local Facebook group to another family who will I’m sure enjoy them too.

We realised that we were unlikely to use them in this garden, and that they also took up more space than we wanted to allocate them in the garage. Their departure was helped by the fact I saw the garden furniture I swooned over at Grand Designs Live back in May in the sale, and reduced by a third. So that was promptly ordered, and has since arrived - and I suspect that may have contributed a little to the change in weather we’ve seen at the start of September, so sorry about that!

Elsewhere in the garden the little crab apple tree remains laden with apples - it looks so weighed down, that I imagine it will be pleased to shed its load when the apples are picked. I’m debating when the best time to pick them is, but I feel it could be imminent as I’ve seen a recipe for crab apple and chilli jelly which sounds right up my street.

The sweet pepper plant - another purchase from the Rutland Flower Show, a bargain at £5 - is producing more peppers and ripening those it already has. We’ve picked six now, and eaten most of them already. I’m hoping that there’ll still be time for the smaller ones to grow and ripen before the weather changes for good.

You’ll have seen in my This August update that our new kitchen sofa arrived, which meant it was time for the garden sofa which we’ve used in the conservatory in our old house and in the kitchen here, to move into the garden. And it’s been a very welcome addition, as it offers a much more relaxed seating option.

Though it did need more than just moving to the garden. MOH rightly pointed out that initially it looked as if we’d just dumped it there before moving it to the tip, which clearly isn’t the case. When the cushions are out, it’s fine, it looks like it belongs but without them, he did have a point.

So cue some softening with plants - the astrantia and santolini one end, and my Gertrude Jekyll rose the other. It works I think, and has helped ground the sofa and make it look as if it really belongs.

Moving those pots led onto moving more pots. We’ve not really been able to enjoy our plants so much this year as they suffered early on and were in the relative shelter of our heat pump trellis. That changed though with this group of cottage garden type plants moving to the end of the garden close to the crab apple tree.

And with this group of plants moving alongside the back wall. I wanted to try them out in parts of the garden where I think they will end up growing, admittedly not in this exact formation or as close together, but for now as groups of pots. I haven’t moved them yet, so so far the master plan in my head hasn’t failed me.

For this post though, I’ll leave you with two views from inside - both from the same window - of the Gertrude Jekyll rose, and the newly planted olive tree.

It really feels like things are starting to come together, and that we’re starting to claim and make the garden our own.