After I had finished the top to my Twelve Crowns Wall Hanging, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Sewing is particularly conducive right now, so I wanted something to sew. But I didn’t want to start on any big projects (mostly because I need to do some serious dyeing…). Then I turned my head ever so slightly and saw my naturally dyed scraps bin starting to look rather full. So I opened my favourite quilting book and started leafing through the pages, coming up with a modified bear’s paw. So I dug into my scraps and started sewing.
A lot of people have their favourite type of block to sew – stars being quite popular. But I love bear’s paws and all their iterations, so I naturally gravitated to those. I also didn’t want to go small, so I made the biggest versions that I could, and they ended up ranging between 12-14″.
All of these are natural dyes in various iterations; cutch, madder, indigo, marigold, and iron applications. I went in making these with no actual plan with what to do with them after. Sometimes not having a plan and just following the flow jump starts ideas, and this certainly did for me. After I was done I sketched out a few new ideas for quilts, including some I never would have done had I not played around like this. I titled the post sketching with patchwork because that’s exactly what it felt like – I was able to play around with a few ideas to just see what happened.
Then the question was, what to do with these six? A random quilt sounded like a lot of fun; throwing together a bunch of blocks that hadn’t meant to be together in the first place. Even with them all being slightly different sizes a few well placed strips of the white can make them all match. However, I ended up not liking the size the quilt would be (and odd 24″ x 36″ affair). It’s a fun idea for the future and we’ll see where that goes.
So, that lead me to the idea of pillow cases. They were certainly big enough for it, so that’s what I ultimately decided on.
I’m really happy with these, and they also aren’t normally something I would have set out to make on my own, but I’m really glad I did. They’ve also given me some new ideas for future projects.
One thing this exercise has highlighted for me is that I definitely need to get back to the dye pots. I have some fabric from past sessions, but not having the time the past two summers to do any dyeing has really depleted my stash. I had planned to do a lot of dyeing this summer, but that completely got away from me. I’ll have to manage over the winter, and preserve what indigo I still have. I have some more quilts planned that’ll go into 2024, but I definitely need to do some dyeing to complete at least one of them.