Baby Bear
April 2016

Baby Bear is the final quanket in my Three Bears series, and I am thrilled to have it finished in time to include it, along with Papa and Mama Bear, in this year’s Hands2Help Charity Quilt Challenge.

I have had little time to spend at the sewing machine over the past few months, however I did take some time recently to better organize my scraps. While I am not quite as organized as other quilters in cutting my scraps into commonly used sizes, I do keep my scraps together by colors. My prior method of keeping them in plastic bags was beginning to get out of hand and needless to say, it looked tacky. So I purchased some cute photo boxes that were on clearance, and have now organized my scraps into these. They look much cuter on the shelf and work much better than the plastic bags did. During the process of organizing, I found that my blue scraps were overflowing, which is what inspired the fabric selection for Baby Bear.

Designing a scrappy quilt, while challenging, is fun and rewarding. Challenges include finding enough scraps in similar or complementary color values and/or saturation, and designing the layout. For me, the layout is usually dictated by the amount of scraps I have that work together. In Baby Bear, I had a lot of country blues – leftovers from the 80’s – and darker blue leftovers from my quanket, Celebration. Using a design wall is great for exploring options in how to arrange blocks, sashing and borders. My design wall is a closet door covered with felt which works great, as it lets me place pieces without the use of pins. For pieces that have more seams, it seems that a pin is needed, otherwise I end up with a pile of pieces on the floor in front of the closet door!