Scraps for Jax - Stripey Scrap Quilt

My friend's son Jackson is in his third round of chemotherapy in his fight against histiocytosis.  Their whole family is amazing...the type who volunteer for everything, even though they've got a lot on their plate.  So as this year's fundraiser to raise money for histiocytosis research got closer, I knew I wanted to help out.  After talking to my friend, we decided I'd make a quilt to raffle off during the event.

Of course besides helping out a great cause...it was fun to have an excuse to make a quilt.  I've been pinning ideas for simple quilts on Pintrest for a while.

I love scrap quilts, so I decided to use this quilt as inspiration and use up some of my stash.  I think there was a little fabric from just about every quilt I've made in there.  It was fun to see some favorite fabrics come together in new ways.

I've had lots of people ask where I found time to make a quilt with a infant and having just moved into a new home.  There are two parts to the answer.  First, I made the time.  The time spent sewing is my "fun" time.  Some people have particular shows they watch for us...I sew.  The other part of the answer is that I chose an easy pattern.

I started by pulling a lot of bright colors out of my stash and cutting lots and lots of 2 1/2 inch strips.  Then I also cut lots of white 2 1/2 inch strips.  I didn't worry about if they were the same length or not...I just sewed them together...one white strip, one light, and one dark.  I really like the way the color gradients worked out.  If one of the strips was shorter than the others, I just filled in the rest with a different fabric.

I ironed the seams toward the darker fabric.

Then I took those strips and cut them into 6 1/2 inch squares...lots of them.  I wanted my finished quilt to be large enough for a twin sized bed, there are 165 squares  (11 squares wide and 15 squares long for a finished size of 66''x90''.  This is big enough to go over a twin with extra on the sizes and ends...or it was big enough to just cover the top of my queen sized bed.

I laid them out on my queen sized bed until I was happy with the balance.  I wanted a balance of warm and cool colors, so half of those were red/orange/yellow, and the other half were green/blue.  (I avoided pink or purple because I wanted the quilt to be gender neutral.)  In general, I alternated between three diagonal rows of warm colors and three of cool colors, but didn't have any set pattern within that.

I wanted it to look patterned and random at the same time...I think I was successful.

Once the quilt top was sewn together, used basting spray (LOVE that stuff!) to layer it and then machine quilted it along each side of the white zigzags on my trusty sewing machine.  I bound the edges with a simple 1/2'' wide white binding.

I love how it turned out...I already want to make another one.

And my awesome neighbor let me photograph it on her cute back porch...since our yard is solid dust/dirt with a few weeds at the moment.

And of course...it left me with a nice little pile of smaller scraps...all 2 1/2 inches wide of of lengths less than 6 inches...so of course I put them into another quilt...which I'll show you another day. ;)


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