rescued blocks – tierneycreates

My collaborative art quilt partner, Betty Anne Guadalupe and I will have a show, “The Collaboration”, opening at Twigs Gallery during the 4th Friday Art Walk, in Sisters, Oregon on Friday, March 25, 2016. The show will run through April 2016 and will feature art quilts we created from “rescued” quilt blocks (projects discarded by other quilters and reinvented/reimagined by us), and recycled materials.

Several of the pieces I have discussed on the tierneycreates blog, including We Will Not Be Discarded! and Tree Outside My Window, will debut at this show.

Below are images from the March 2016 issues of Cascade A&E Magazine (Central Oregon’s Arts & Entertainment Magazine):

Fabric Scraps Obsession, Studio, What's on the Design Wall

What’s on the Design Wall: “We Will Not Be Discarded!”

January 12, 2016October 22, 2018 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

My collaborative partner on The Wardrobe Meets the Wall, Betty Anne Guadalupe and I have been fascinated with the idea of “Rescuing Blocks” that other quilters have discarded and we have an ongoing obsession with fabric scraps given to us by other quilters.

A quilting friend of ours (we think it was our friend Judy?) gave Betty Anne “Trimmed Block Discards” a while back (a couple years ago at a quilt retreat?).

What do I mean by by “Trimmed Block Discards”? I mean the ends of sections or blocks pieced for a quilt that trimmed off to make the quilt fit together. These are usually tossed in the trash by quilters (except those pathologically obsessed with scraps).

Betty Anne recently gave me these discards and challenged me to make an art quilt piece out of them. I could not turn down such a challenge: The ends of someone else’s blocks meant for the trash – recycled into a quilt!

I have already named the piece: “We Will Not Be Discarded!”

I started with figuring out a uniform way to make the discards work. I decided to float them in a coordinating solid:

Trimming the discards into triangle shapes:

The discards all trimmed into various sizes triangles and ready for the design wall:

On the Design Wall – waiting for what happens next…

To be continued…

Postscript

Here are several other posts on playing with rescued blocks and discards from other quilters:

What’s on the Design Wall: The Tree Outside My Window

What Was On the Design Wall: Rescued Blocks

Studio, What's on the Design Wall

What’s on the Design Wall: Rescued Blocks II

June 20, 2015July 13, 2016 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Update: If you would like to see the completed quilt top for the abstract art quilt piece I discussed in What’s on the Design Wall: Working Through a New Art Quilt Piece, check out the post on The Wardrobe Meets the Wall blog In Progress: Abandoned Structure. It is awaiting quilting mastery by Betty Anne Guadalupe my collaborator in the The Wardrobe Meets the Wall.

If you don’t want them, I will take them…

In a previous post What’s Was On the Design Wall: Rescued Blocks I discussed the pleasures of working with “abandoned blocks“. Abandoned quilt blocks are blocks that another quilter does not want and gives to you or you find at a thrift shop or garage sale and decide to adopt!

Recently a quilter friend gave me a cool stack of batik freely pieced abstract blocks that she no longer wanted to work on in addition to a pile of coordinating scraps of fabric. I love batiks and I love her combination of colors so I was very excited to adopt these blocks! As a bonus I discovered that the trees that I printed on batik fabric during a fabric surface design workshop I took in April (see post What’s On the Design Wall: Fabric Surface Design Experimentation), appear to work well with the newly adopted blocks!

Below is the piece in it’s very early stages (I threw all the adopted blocks and my tree printed blocks up on the Design Wall in a random manner) and we’ll see how the piece progresses. You know I will post updates.

My friend who also likes working with abandoned blocks (she collects them from thrift stores, garage sales and guild meetings) and I joke about someday having an exhibit of our collection of pieces made from other’s discards!

Studio, What's on the Design Wall

What Was On the Design Wall: Rescued Blocks

April 20, 2015February 25, 2019 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Usually I post about what’s on the design wall – what I am currently working on. I was looking through some digital photos and came across photos from when I was working on the 1930’s Block Quilt, made from rescued blocks. So this is sort of a “design wall retrospective” post!

I am fascinated with recycling fabric, especially fabric intended for other purposes (clothing, blankets, upholstery, etc.). I also enjoy finding abandoned blocks and rescuing them!

What are “abandoned blocks”? They are quilt blocks leftover from making a quilt (when too many blocks were made than needed), or when a quilt was started but not finished and the quilter just gave up on the blocks. You can rescue sets of abandoned blocks from thrift stores, friends, and even inside your own stash! Betty Anne had a friend who found a set of block from the 1930s in her attic and did not want them. Betty Anne rescued them and then let me adopt them!

Originally these rescued blocks did not fit together and were in a strange pattern (so strange that no matter what I did I could not make them fit together). So I redesigned the blocks, cutting off the left and right corners (which I recycled into the quilt’s border). After trimming down the blocks they fit well together into a small lap size quilt (41″ x 44 1/2″).

The abandon blocks are now rescued and part of a quilt (I bet they are a lot happier than they would be just sitting around an attic all alone!)