Scrap Talk

Does it ever happen to you that you are pondering a concept, an issue, a possibility, just thinking about it and considering that when refined it might be fodder for a blog post, and all of a sudden you find that someone else (or several someone elses) has been doing the same pondering? That has happened to me, and it has happened again this morning.

What I'd been thinking about is scrappy quilts. There are some scrappy quilts that I love and some that I find horrendous not to my taste. I've noticed a movement to use up scraps and while this is surely something laudable, I think it can be carried too far. Thirties and Kaffes and daiwabo all together in one project. Makes my eyes blur and my head ache.

Last spring Bonnie Hunter was in town and did a workshop for a group of people I'd pulled together; her topic was letters, wonky stars, and crumb blocks, all made out of scraps.  People loved it, and I learned a lot of new and different techniques. Bonnie's such a fabulous teacher, all hands-on, and I was tickled to finally learn the letters and the wonky stars. But the crumb blocks made me a bit twitchy!  Putting all that stuff together, stuff that didn't go with each other, not just into one project but into one block.  Oh dear. People were giggling at my nervousness. But I jumped in and found the process to be fun. I discovered that the completed blocks that I liked all had bits of one distinctive fabric that sort of unified them. Echoing in my ears were the words of the great Liza Lucy who once hollered out during a workshop, "Oh, Nancy, don't be so anal!"

I'm all for making use of scraps. No issue there. But the end product, for me, has to be pretty, has to have some sort of cohesion, kind of like the way my friend Helen takes scraps, sorts them by color, and then makes wee little montages of one color at a time. My current leader-ender is scrappy crumb blocks (see, I did buy into them!), but there is a theme, MAWL*.

So, anyway, getting back to the beginning, this morning as I was trawling the blogs, I came upon this post and knew, once again, that there is some sort of a collective consciousness out there.  Julie's April barn is spectacular, but after you get done admiring it, scroll down to below "Elsewhere in the studio . . . " and come to her phrase for the year. Amen, Julie. Amen.



*More About Which Later
Oh, and BTW, that scrap picture at the top isn't mine.  It's from Google images.