01 May Dot Matrix Scrap Buster Quilt
For Earth Day/Month 2023, I decided to challenge myself to make a quilt completely using scraps and fat quarters from my fabric stash. As much as I love the thrill of buying new fabric, it’s important to make use of what we already own and not just let it collect dust or take up valuable storage space or (god forbid!) end up in a landfill when we decide it’s not really our style anymore.
I offered the Dot Matrix Block Pattern for free for the month of April to encourage other quilters to “sew their stash” too.
Because I sew baby clothing and accessories for my other business, Small Potatoes, I tend to have a lot of weird odd shaped scraps. If the scraps are not large enough to make any of my products, they go in one of my many scrap bins.
To ensure my scrappy quilt had some uniformity, I dug through my bins and pulled out all the pink fabrics I could find. I then folded them neatly to make a pretty towering stack of pink. Then I chose 16 “low volume” (light coloured) fat quarters to use for my backgrounds. I tend to collect a lot of low volume prints because they often come with fat quarter bundles and I don’t usually use them in my fat quarter quilts.
Next, I started cutting out all my pink shapes using a template as my guide. Don’t they look pretty all piled up neatly? I also cut up one fat quarter per block for the background fabric.
I sewed my pink shapes with the background shapes and started making my blocks. I just loved seeing the magic happen when the corners of multiple blocks came together creating a pink “dot”.
And the best part is seeing some of the fabrics that have been squirreled away in my scrap bin for ages getting a new life alongside some of my new favourite prints.
I found this awesome pink variegated thread at a local shop. I mean how perfect is that!?! It’s a 50 weight Wonderfil thread called Tutti and the colour name is Hibiscus.
I bought this absolutely beautiful yardage of a print from the Ruby Star Society collection called Camellia last year during a blow-out Black Friday sale. I used the pink RSS Spark print for my binding.
Once I finished all my blocks I decided that I wanted to quilt it with curved “walking foot” quilting. I made the paper quilting template seen below for a previous project and I thought it would be perfect for this quilt too. It doesn’t look like much in the photo but this wavy template helps make a really cool intertwined curvy design. I did all the quilting on my domestic sewing machine over the course of a a few evenings.
See how fun that intertwined curved quilting looks?
I finished the quilting and binding just in time for Earth Day and in time to share it at my local quilt guild’s meeting show-and-share. I was so happy with how it turned out and excited to show it to my fellow guild members.
Thanks for your interest in my scrappy pink Dot Matrix Quilt. I hope you enjoyed reading about my quilt-making process!
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