My First Crazy Quilt

I'm in the midst of my spring cleaning and one thing I have a lot of is scraps of material. (It happens when you sew a lot and can't bring yourself to throw out excess pieces of awesome material no matter how small.) So I've decided to take my basket of scraps and sew them all together into a crazy quilt. A crazy quilt is aptly named because the pieces don't form a specific pattern, you just sew them all together no matter what type of material or what size or shape. The resulting effect is quite literally "crazy." It's a great quilt to start with if you've never quilted because you don'thave to worry how it looks.

The other cool thing about a crazy quilt is that it prevents waste. It's a great way to upcycle the extra material pieces instead of just throwing them out where they'd end up in a landfill. I read once that 15-20% of the fabric used to create clothing ends up in landfills because it's cheaper for clothing companies to just dump the extra scrap fabric than to recycle it. I don't want my projects to be part of that statistic, so I intend to make quilts out of the fabric scraps and keep them out of the already overcrowded landfills. No waste here!

This is my started quilt. It's going to be a combination of everything from hemp and alova to satin and pleather. Most every sewing project I do has scraps and it's time to put them to use. And when I'm finished, I'd like to see if I could give it to the Ugly Quilts organization where it could really do someone some good.