Batik Scrap Stash-Busting

Scraps are scraps, but for some reason batik scraps seem special to me. Maybe it's because they work in landscape quilts so well. So mine have their own drawer, where they're sorted by color family.

After six years, the drawer is full. Time to do some batik scrap busting.

 Strips were cut, some remaining straight-edged (many were from leftover binding) and some quickly given a wavy edge with the rotary cutter.

For a sky, raw-edge strips of purple, pink, red-orange and yellow-orange batik were glued (edges only) to a piece of batting (which had already been fused to a backing fabric), each strip slightly overlapping the one above it.

Then came some mountain shapes, then strips for water. Last, a wider yellow-gold strip was glued down for beach.

Sailboat fabrics were trotted out for auditioning. Paper-backed fusible was applied to the wrong side of the chosen boats before cutting them out.

One edge satin-stitched; lots more to go.

All strip edges were quickly stitched down with Superior clear Mono-Poly on low tension.

Deciding to satin-stitch the raw edges of the sky and mountains, I chose several colors of 40-weight polyester thread (Isacord) for the top and a 100-weight polyester (Invisifil) for the bobbin. 

Using a dense (.35 stitch length), a medium-wide (5.0) zigzag stitch, a size 14 topstitch needle and the open-toe dual-feed foot, I spent two pleasant afternoons covering raw edges at a moderate speed. Not a single thread broke or bird-nested.

This area of the water was accidentally shorted on fabric. Enough batting showed through that I didn't trust the satin-stitching to cover it. What to do?

Easy. (This whole project is easy!) Just cut out another piece of fabric and glue it over the area. Here you see it before the raw edges were stitched down:

Also, see that all-too-obvious vertical join? No problem there, either. It will be covered with the sail of one of the boats.

Oh, and what to do with the leftover trimmings from the strips?

Cut them up into little pieces for a confetti quilt! No waste here when it comes to batiks. Even the selvages get cut up. I think of these little bags of confetti as tubes of paint, and there's quite a palette accumulating in these two lettuce containers.

Next time, this scrap project will be a finished landscape quilt.


Moving on to some news from the 2016 Kentucky State Fair: The Visit received first place in the landscape/pictorial category. My first blue ribbon ever!

Type garrison quilt into the search box (on sidebar) to see posts about the making of The Visit.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Linda