Once a year our Utah Valley Quilt Guild brings in a national teacher for a workshop one day and the guild meeting’s program the next.  I signed up for the class with about 20 other women and today we met in Mapleton to learn how to make “Crumb Quilts.”  I’d done quite a bit of reading and watching youtube clips on the process, so I already had in mind what I wanted to do and I had my tub of scraps ready to use.

I used a method I’d learned online from a gal who calls these “Vortex Quilts.”  She’s posted her 4 tutorials here:

http://crazymomquilts.blogspot.com/2015/06/scrap-vortex-qal-week-one.html 

Emily’s method was similar, but she uses her scrap blocks in other quilts like these:

Today I worked on sewing two like-sized pieces together.  After I had a good pile of those, I cut them apart, pressed and trimmed them.  Then I sewed my twos into fours, cut, pressed and trimmed them.  By the time I left, I had a good pile of crumb chunks.  It’s like making your own fabric out of your scraps.  I loved it.  Each scrap is from a quilt I’ve made sometime in the last 30 years or so.  I loved the memories of them.

Our room was filled with everyone’s tubs of scraps of all colors and sizes.  It was a lot of fun to make sense of them.

I worked on my chunks some more when I got home and by the end of the day, I had these big chunks.  They make me happy.  I’ll start another pile of twos, then fours, then eights and work until I’ve exhausted my bin and have enough for a fun quilt.  Almost all of these pieces were just leftover ends and bits from other projects.  I didn’t really have to do any cutting for this project, just mindless sewing!