It was just a matter of time before I hacked one of the patterns from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts ...
Ever since I made the original Pixelated Herringbone, I wanted to make a version from my scrap bin. Early this spring my sewing schedule was finally clear. It was time!
The Piecing and Fabric Pull
I let my stash and scraps dictate the palette for this version. I found two blues in my stash that worked well together, and I took them to my big bin of 2.5-inch squares. A bunch of Art Gallery scraps in blues, teals, mauves, and grays set the palette. When my scrap bin didn’t provide enough of a particular color or value, I cut a 2.5-inch strip from stash.
The beauty of the Pixelated Herringbone design lies in the strip sets used in its construction. (It’s a pixelated quilt that takes much less time than you’d imagine!) Once I decided to make the design scrappy, however, I had to veer from my own instructions.
The chunks of solid fabrics were still constructed with strip sets, but because I was using 2.5-inch squares from my scrap bin, the sections with prints had to be assembled individually. If I were a leader-and-ender kind of gal, I would have gone that route and sewn the prints together slowly over time. I do not sew any leader-and-ender projects, though, and instead sewed all the print units at once. This approach took longer than the original Pixelated Herringbone I made for the book, but the finished quilt top was worth the extra time. I foresee making more scrappy beauties like this one!
The Quilting and Binding
Pixelated Herringbone is a big quilt, measuring in at 64.5 inches by 80.5 inches, so instead of quilting it myself, I passed the torch to Lilo Whitener-Fey of Trace Creek Quilting to do her magic. She quilted the project with an edge-to-edge panto called Hexi Flower.
I’ve been doing more quilting myself lately—mainly because I’ve been making smaller quilts and have had the time to quilt projects on my domestic—but my straight-line quilting would have fallen flat here. Working with a longarmer as skilled as Lilo was the way to go!
To finish off the project, I used a stripe from Denyse Schmidt’s 2009 collection, Hope Valley. I tried multiple solids to tone down the scrappiness of the project, but the stripe really drives the idea home that this is a scrappy quilt.
Do you, too, have a giant bin of 2.5-inch squares? A scrappy Pixelated Herringbone requires 480 of them. I wish I could say this made a discernible dent in my bin, but it didn’t!
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