quilt progress (pictures)

[dragonlady7]

So I've made it a little farther on the salvaged-pajamas rag quilt. I decided to take almost no pains with the thing; the front is all one kind of flannel, the back all a different one, and the "batting" is, at random, scraps of two wildly different colors, and that shows through at the seams and so I should have arranged them in some fashion, but I did not and it is too late now!
So far I only have nine squares, because that makes it square. It covers my lap, and my legs if I have them folded. I should add seven more, to make it four on a side, but that's a lot; I might just add three more and make it longer than it is wide. It's about uhhhhh thirty by thirty inches, at the moment, or so-- I cut 11" squares, then trimmed them to 10.5 or 11" each, then sewed closer to 1/2" seam allowances, so they're really about 10" across.
I probably have enough fabric to do seven more squares but to be safe, I definitely have three more squares. Some of them are already pieced; I'll run out of the back fabric sooner.

The front looks fine, it's plaid and running at random either horizontal or vertical-- ha, most of them are going one direction-- and then two of the top bits are crazily pieced together, mostly because it pleased me to do so. It's all mostly hidden in how busy plaid is. I noticed that the plaid had a few little red lines in it, so I'm using red quilting thread to do a couple of lines of quilting across each panel, and that looks great. HOWEVER, the back has only pale blues and whites on it, so the red looks dumb there. Oh well, I'm not worried. I might applique some things on, or might not. Probably not.


showing the exposed seams-- now i've got to trim and slash those, then run it through a wash and dryer cycle to beat it up so they fray, which is the point of a "rag quilt". We'll see if it works; it might not.
red quilting thread: not super visible from this side!


Assistant is Unconvinced. (This was this morning.)

Better image of the colors, this photo was just now, and shows the back:


You see how some of the seams have lime green? That was a fleece pajama shirt that's now batting. The rest is a more copacetic blue/green/purple pastel fleece, that shows through and matches the backing fabric. I should've either trimmed the green down or laid it out nonsequentially but I Did Not; too late! LOL.


This is very much a I Am Giving Zero Shits quilt, and I hope it turns out usable for something. I find the rag look untidy but I also am well aware that it is by far the easiest method if you are not assembling a whole quilt top over a whole unbroken sheet of batting with a whole unpieced back, which just isn't.... a thing I'm likely to do.

(And in all my Googling, I'm finding that the vast majority of quilters who blog about it... don't really do the quilting part themselves. Many of them do these incredibly elaborate pieced tops and then... "finish" them by leaving them as "flimsies", which I'm not sure what that means but I think it means just the quilt top with no batting?? I'm not sure. I care the least about the piecing part, and the most about the actual quilting part, and i seem to be very much in the minority, at least as far as writing about it on the Internet goes. Which, fair enough; it's hard to photograph the actual quilting part.

I do have an embroidery frame I've never used that I'd quite like to. I'm not going to use it for this rag quilt.

Comments

[sabotabby]

That's some hardcore side-eye from Chita, especially given how cozy that quilt looks.

[dragonlady7]

Ha, I'm leaning away from her to take the photo, and she is Not Best Pleased; she would prefer it if I were petting her.

[wyomingnot]

When I was quilting, I just hand tied corners of blocks. That was enough to keep everything together without being a headache trying to machine quilt or actual hand-quilt. The whole piecework of the top was the whole point of the exercise for me.