Keep things interesting

Our house growing up had a lot of quilts made by my grandma. A lot of them were heavy-duty utilitarian wool quilts. If we needed to line the bottom of our tent camping, we lined it with one of those. If we needed to cover something in the back of the truck, it was usually covered with one of those. The wool quilts kind of look like the one above. They were made out of cut-up old wool clothing: slacks, skirts, jackets, you name it.

Grandma also makes a lot of beautiful quilts. My parents have a "Grandmother's flower garden" quilt that they used to always have on their bed. When we were little and would go hop on my parents' bed on Saturday mornings, I remember looking at the quilt and finding my favorite fabric patterns. There was one with a kitten on it, and that was usually it. I think there's another flower that's made out of fabric that my dad also has a shirt made from. It's a good quilt.

But one thing that always bothered me about these quilts and others is that there was always a flaw in the pattern. Most of the flowers were bordered in white, but one or two of them were bordered in off-white. Or maybe the heavy-duty wool one would have a diagonal stripe of blue blocks, but then one of them would be green.

It really bothered me.

But that's the beauty of scrap quilts: you use what you have. I guess back in the day, people made quilts in order to use up what they had leftover from making clothes and other items. And sometimes you had enough scraps of one color to make a pattern, but other times you didn't. So you improvised.

It still sort of bothers the obsessive-compulsive side of me (the side that uses hyphens and corrects spelling).

But I'm making a scrap quilt. For most of the blocks, I have enough scraps of one color to complete the pattern. But for some I don't. And the fabric is just too cute to leave out, and so I improvise. Maybe I have a gold pattern for 3/4 of what I need. So I just fill in with some yellow for the last 1/4. I try to make it hard to notice, but when you look carefully, it shows.

I hope someday someone will hop onto my bed (or look at their baby quilt-- I'm not THAT ambitious) and try to decide which is their favorite star. They'll look at the designs and notice that, hey, that corner isn't the same as the rest. Hey, that white background has flowers on it. What's going on?

It's good to keep things interesting.