heARTS Creations

An Island Batik Adventure

Now it’s time for the Great Outdoors Blog Hop & Giveaways! All month long the Island Batik Ambassadors will show their creations using newly released Island Batik Fabrics. Most will be doing a giveaway and Island Batik is also doing a giveaway! You can enter through the raffle copter at the end of this post.

And here’s the schedule. Enjoy all the amazing quilts. I am so proud to be a part of such a talented group of quilters and thrilled to use such high quality beautiful fabrics.

Enter the Island Batik give-away (http://www.islandbatik.com/news/index.php/terms-and-conditions/) HERE.

There are so many “scrap saver systems” I have read about.  Mine is pretty simple.  I have six bins – five are sorted by color (red & orange; brown; black & white; yellow and green; blue; Kaffe fabrics.)

My batiks are all in one of the big bins in my tower of bins.

I have never been very good about filing papers, and the same has been true of my fabric scraps! I have been putting my scraps in an open bin and then later I “file” them.  The bin was overflowing so I decided to go ahead and file all the scraps and eliminate the bin – hope this works for me!

I really like the scrap bins I have and how they fit on my shelves. They are quite full though, so I am planning another scrap quilt.  I have done quite a few scrap quilts and enjoy them enough that another will be fun.  This time I’m going to cut a bunch of the longer scraps into one and one-half inch strips. I have a pro cutting machine so the task won’t be too difficult.  What I really, really dislike is pressing all those small pieces of fabrics.  Wish I knew a young person who would like to earn some extra $$ by pressing the scraps for me. There was a young gal we hired some years ago who was an excellent worker but she is now all grown and making the big bucks!

I even lettered a tee shirt that pretty much says it all!

An Island Batik Adventure

July Ambassador assignment – a secondary pattern. I found myself scouring patterns to find a secondary pattern I wanted to try. Then I found one that started out as a nine patch – really?  You can’t even see the nine patch anymore! This was the original nine patch pieced with Aurifil thread:

This is how the nine patch was then cut:

I got the block pattern from Beyond Sock Monkeys. She used the blocks she created for two different quilts.  I decided to combine the two blocks and used one for the border. And I love the border! Can you see the secondary patterns?  A four patch, a cross?

Honestly, it took me a while to embrace this quilt. What really helped was when my daughter visited, saw the quilt on the design board and declared “I love that quilt!” Now that it’s done, it is hers – Yeah!

I had several blocks leftover, as the only way the border was going to work was if the quilt was square. So, I took some of the leftovers and made a table runner. Now, the table runner I really like and am using it.  I’m also pleased with the quilting motif I used on the larger quilt.

Now on to our August challenge, Blog Hop and Giveaways! Thank you Island Batik for this opportunity of fun and sharing!

Linking up with Fiber Tuesday, WIPs on Wednesdays,  Moving it Forward, NTT