sewbizgirl

The only way you will get 'mud soup' is if you don't understand color "value" and how to use it. By "value" I mean how light or dark a fabric is. Normally, you have your lights (neutrals), darks, and your mediums. Then, to make it more interesting, the same fabric value may look like a dark against one fabric, and a medium or light against another, and it's totally fine to play them that way in your quilt. To keep a scrappy quilt interesting you need to know how to choose which fabrics to put next to each other. You need contrast. Otherwise... mud soup.

I'm sure it's easy to pull random scraps out of a bag and sew them together, but that won't get you the prettiest quilts. You need to discern what goes against what, and not leave it up to chance.

Prism99

On a slightly different note, if it were me trying to use up a lot of small scraps, I would opt for something easier than the pattern you posted. It's a lot of working cutting scraps into 2-7/8" squares. If you cut them 3" for this technique and plan on cutting the finished triangles down to size (which makes for more accuracy), again this is a lot of work and a lot of time.

For your next scrappy quilt to use up fabric, you might want to opt for something that would be faster and less demanding in terms of accuracy. This would allow you to get to the buying-more-fabric stage faster!

Here are some things I might do. Piece small, uncut scraps together to get bigger pieces of pieced fabric from which I could then cut bigger pieces to piece together into a quilt. For triangles, for example, you could do 12" blocks made up of a light pieced triangle and a dark pieced triangle (made with the same technique you are using). You could cut any shapes you want out of your created fabric.

I just think you are making it awfully hard on yourself by choosing a pattern that starts out with such small pieces, as it will take a long time to make the quilt. Of course, I am looking at it primarily from the point of view of using up enough of the scraps quickly to be able to buy fabric again. This is mainly because, knowing myself, I would get bogged down with cutting, piecing, pressing and assembling so darn many small pieces! If you can see your way to creating larger pieces of fabric from your small pieces *before* cutting, I think you would see a quilt come together much faster.

Marley46

Have a look at Bonnie Hunters site. Quiltville.com You will learn all about Scrappy!!

QuiltnLady1

When I first started doing scrappy quilts, the teacher said that you need contrast. Most of us have a lot of mediums in our stash and as a result we put too many pieces of the same value. Having lights and darks is really good provides definition for the pattern. The other thing she said is to have a place to rest your eye. In the pattern you sent the link to, the dark sashing provides the resting place for your eye. Each triangle pair has a lot of contrast the light triangles are significantly lighter than the dark triangles. These elements make the quilt striking.

Your quilt gets muddy from lack of contrast. When there are a lot of mediums or the mediums are either too close to the darks or lights that they are paired with then the quilt has a more monotone look. One classic technique to determine if your values have enough contrast is to take black and white pictures of the fabrics next to each other until you can look at them and see if there is enough contrast.

Maureen NJ

This has been a very interesting thread. Thanks for all the info.

MeadowMist

Yes, lots of great info here!!! I think my other quilt came out like mud because of the lack of contrast - I had lots of mediums, a few darks and a few lights. The darks stood out and looked good but but everything else looked "confused." I also had lots of different "themes" - modern florals, 30's, civil war, Christmas brights, etc.

Prism - yes, agreed, it really was a lot of work cutting up the squares, and yeah, I also cut them a little big and then cut down to size, so there's even more work. But they are cut, so I'm just going to move forward. Like you I get bogged down with all the cutting, piecing, and pressing. But I love assembling and having everything fall into place. Hopefully I'll move forward fast cause I really want to get on to my next scrappy - though I'm thinking of giving away some of my scraps to the local guilds yearly sale.

Marley - great site, I haven't seen her site before, I like it!

Edited to add - I didn't realize the picture posted. This IS NOT my mud quilt. This is another scrappy made from my leftovers from my Christmas pillow project.

redquilter

I think it's fantastic and because of the black sashing it keeps it from being overly scrappy.

lynnie

that's a great pattern if you have lights and darks. I think I mostly have darks.
I love all kinds of scrappy quilts. A few yrs ago, I made a crumb quilt. I'll quilt
it this year with squiggles on my friends LA machine. For me, anything goes.

Bree123

In the picture on the pattern, they followed the rule of always putting the lighter colored fabric on top & the darker one on bottom. That was a rule that Mary Fons taught in a workshop I took with her & it seems to work. The other important thing is to have one thing that sticks out from the rest because of its color, print or texture and then repeat that a few times (odd numbers tend to be more visually pleasing) throughout the design.

Other than that, I don't really follow any rules. Mostly I believe "the scrappier the better" -- but too little variation makes for a boring quilt & too much makes me dizzy. The other scrappy quilt you posted is quite beautiful, though, so clearly you've learned some tricks since that one unhappy attempt.

One more thing ... it helps to take a B&W or "tonal" photo of the fabrics to rule out any troublemakers before you being piecing. There is a setting to do that on iPhones or you can edit in a photo editor on your computer.

joe'smom

Definitely no mud there! Beautiful!