It Takes a Village

It's that time again -- Amy has her fall edition of Blogger's Quilt Festival active for a week, starting today.  If ever you wanted to see an encyclopedia of quilt goodness, it's worth taking a stroll through all the submissions.

I am going to submit my "It Takes a Village" because of what it means to me.  I love this quilt.  I love the women it represents.  I love to quilt.  

Seriously -- take a minute and walk through the incredible quilts and stories over at Amy's Creative Side!

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I am a scrap hound.  I admit it.  I like it.  I profit from it!

I call this quilt "It Takes a Village" for a very special reason.  Only about 40% of this quilt is from my scraps.  The rest have come from my friends in the village where we lived outside Chicago.  It's all batiks and I haven't done much with batiks in the past few years.   A few of them, however, work mainly in batiks (to my advantage, I'd like to say) and aren't particularly fond of small scraps and using them up (to my advantage, I'd like to say!!!!!).

When we would get together to sew, it was always great fun to find a little baggie of snippets.  Some might be a bit too small to use but many could easily become 1.5" squares or greater.  And there was one particular trash basket at MacQuilts house that was always worth going through if I could get there before the cleaning lady.  My goodness, I've found some great scraps in there.  Tsk!  Tsk!

Even more touching for me have been the times that a package would show up at my door after we moved to Kentucky and there would be baggies of cute little batik goodness in there.  Hence, the name of this quilt.

I did lots of "cutting" for it but not in the usual sense.  I pulled out all my 1.5" squares, some 1.5" strips,  trimmed up all the donated scraps, and started sewing!  This has been such fun.  Between the fabric and the randomness of it, it really was "grab and go" sewing.

The quilt is modeled after Tonya Ricucci's "Lego" quilt that I found on her site about a year ago.  There are a number of posts where she talks about her process and that led to a plethora of similar quilts being made and enjoyed by other quilters.

Basically, these are 10.5" blocks that are set 6 x 6 so the quilt finishes at 60" square.  As I started to lay it out, I wasn't thrilled with the fairly apparent demarcation where all the blocks were coming together vertically, so I changed the setting a bit.  The first row is six 10" blocks.  The second row starts with a half block followed by five 10" blocks and ends with another half block.  That breaks it up a bit.  You can certainly still see the blocks when you look but it's a bit less obvious. The third row is six 10" blocks and so on.

As I laid the blocks out, I actually looked for places where the "logs" were the same fabric end-to-end -- or at least similar.  This is the first time in my quilting life that I wanted same fabrics touching!  That helped break the lines a bit more.  As you can see in the red piece here in the corner, there are two blocks there but the same fabric is a bit of a fooler unless you look closely.

So -- I love this quilt.  It's really not mine.  I made it but the fabric was from special people who are now in Chicago, Iowa, and the Bluegrass area of Kentucky.  My intention (once I get it labeled and washed) is that it goes to them.  It can travel among MacQuilts, CookingMama, Mom22SmartChix, MyNeicetheQuilter, LogCabinQuilter, and ShirasGram.  They can keep it as long as they want (years!) and then pass it on to the next one.  I certainly don't need it -- I've had my joy in looking at the fabric, playing with them, remembering the person that shared them, and often recalling the project they were used in.  Aren't quilting friends the best?

I would absolutely make this quilt again.  It's a great way to use those 1.5" strips of all sizes and walk down memory lane.  I hope you're finding time to be creative and remember those you enjoy sharing your quilting with!  Jan