Second Chances
You can talk yourself into anything. You’re trying to get started on a new quilt and know that the fabric in front of you just isn’t the right shade, but you’re tired, have been to three stores looking for one that’s better and just want to get going. Maybe it’s just the lighting in here, you wonder hopefully.
Eventually you come to your senses and realize that you can’t live with it and need to remove the offending pieces. It’s painful, but you tell yourself that it’s less painful than looking at that same unfortunate combination in a finished quilt.
So in the spirit of Use What You Have and Finish What You Have, Bill and I have started to tackle the basket of Ziploc bags filled with pieces of ill-fated projects. The amazing thing is that in almost every case one simple change is all that stands between a great quilt and an ugly one.
We had a bunch of pieced triangles that we had rejected because the brownish fabric had looked too muddy with the pink fabric we had wanted to use with it. So we pulled the triangles with the darker peach fabric and we paired them with some cream fabrics. The pink made the peach look brown but the cream made the peach just look like another shade of peach. We reconfigured the blocks and voila, a nice quilt.
Then there’s the second chances given to scraps. We had scraps of red log cabin blocks leftover from a quilt in which blue blocks are spliced together with red.
This is the original quilt entitled Horizon. We spliced together the red and blue blocks along the curve. Don’t try this at home!
I couldn’t bear to toss the scraps of red blocks, so I cut them up and used them in a contemporary crazy quilt piecing technique, added a few new fabrics and there’s no trace of the rigid geometry of the original blocks.
Perhaps the most important lesson here is that it’s rare to be able to turn a failure into a success or waste into resource without too much work but it’s so great when you can. Now instead of getting that sick feeling looking at all of those blocks that didn’t work out or about the time spent piecing something that then had to be trimmed down, we get to look at two fresh quilts. Best of all we salvaged all of the time, money and effort we thought we had lost.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Oh you are awesome. I wish I had your eye to fix the problems I have. Can you please look at the webside link and see what you can do with this thing. The squares are two inches each, so it is really too big for placemats. Do you think it is salvagable?
June 27th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
voila! brilliant AND beautiful. i have so many uglies i just don’t know where to start. thanks for inspiring….
June 27th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
oh, they’re really really beautiful, those second chance quilts. thanks for the inspiration.
June 28th, 2006 at 12:06 am
Wow! You are amazing. I always let the “blems” pile up for too long and end up tossing the whole batch.
June 28th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
this is what i needed to read today. gah.
so nice. thankyou.
June 28th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Fantastic! I have a whole shoebox filled with cast-off squares, and it kills me not to use them. Now I’ll go look at them with new eyes….
June 28th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Absolutely beautiful quilts. Wow!
Redemption in fabric…
June 29th, 2006 at 5:48 am
Beautiful. I’m not a quilter, but a knitter. I have always found that when I have to improvise on a project, due to not having enough of a certain color, or having too much of a color, the result is always much better than the orginial plan would have been. Improvisation results in freshness, and those quilts are fresh.