Scrappy Trips

Keryn and I managed to acquire a lot of fabric last year  that was very affordable and thus our respective stashes grew , um, quite a lot. Most of this was not the reproductions that I truly love but modern brighter colours that were still really appealing. Now we have to try and use it all!

I decided to make a Scrappy Trips, from Bonnie at Quiltville , found in the free patterns tab. I limited myself to orange, blue and green and a bit of yellow.

Hmm,so far so good, I liked the jumble of different patterns together, even if it was a bit chaotic.

However I wasn't such a fan of the blocks all set edge to edge like this. I tried different layouts but because I'd only made twelve blocks they all looked unbalanced. I was already sick of them and didn't want to cut any more out, so the diagonal orange lines seemed the only solution. And yet it was so busy I just wasn't satisfied. Plus it was too small.

So I scouted through the stash and found a soft yellow that sort of calmed things down a bit and put space into the chaos.

A suitable blue was finally found for the border and this top was done. I don't know why everything was so hard to decide on this project,  but at least I saw it through to completion. I made this pattern years ago and thought it was a real no-brainer to use up random fabric. I think I might need to go back to my browns and reproduction pinks for a while, at least I know how to use them without a struggle!

I looked at the cut offs from the end of the strip sets I'd sewn, and put them together into this little mat.  I like the random placing of the pieces and the different widths, it was good to use them up instead of putting them in the bin.