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- Hello everybody, and welcome
to The Great Wisconsin Quilt Show.
And I see that you're all here,
excited and ready to learn about scrap quilting.
[audience cheering]
My name is Judy Gauthier.
And I am here with my very, very dear friend
and assistant, Cathy Roeder.
And we are from Ripon, Wisconsin.
I have a-- Yay!
I have a little quilt shop in Ripon, Wisconsin.
And I also am the author of six books for C&T publishing,
four of which are on scrap quilting.
And we are going to talk today
about how to make successful scrap quilts
when you have to marry fabrics together
that are difficult to put together.
I'm also gonna be presenting you with my color theory,
which isn't the one and only color theory
in the world, right?
There're a lot of people that have great ideas
about how to put color together.
But I've compacted it and made it simple
so that you can do scrap quilting
without a lot of paralyzing, agonizing, right?
That kind of thing.
So we're gonna talk about this,
which when everybody looks at it, they go, "Whoa," right?
It's like seeing new sheet music if you're a piano player.
You know, when the first time you see it,
you're like, "Ah, I can't do it."
But you can.
And we're gonna show you exactly how to do this.
Okay, the other thing.
I wanna have a disclaimer ahead of time
to say that I'm also a retired ICU nurse
and I've worked in ICU exclusively,
and I've never worked any place else as a nurse.
So if somebody closes their eyes,
I might need to come down
and check your level of consciousness.
[audience laughing]
And it hurts.
[audience laughing]
Okay.
So with that, let's get started.
So these are my books.
This is the first one.
This is Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
This is the first one that I wrote.
The second one isRainbow Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
The third one isSensational Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
Right?
Not much variation in the title.
And this is my most recent,
which isQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers,okay?
This one has instructions
for four different techniques for doing quilt-as-you-go
so that you can quilt your large quilts
on a domestic machine without having to,
you know, get real caught up
in the weeds of having a big quilt
underneath your throat of your sewing machine, okay?
So every single one of my quilts
in my books are made with only a three and a half,
a four and a half, and a five and a half-inch square, okay?
Again, that gives you the ability to plan ahead.
It lets you know what size scrap will be usable, right?
Stuff that's smaller than that, I don't use.
There's lots of great books out there
about teeny tiny little scraps.
But I'm not your girl for teeny tinies, okay?
People oftentimes, oh, so this is the tool
that goes with the books, all right?
This is, it has the markings on there
for the three and a half, the four and a half,
and the five and a half-inch square
so that you can cut your squares,
your scraps into those sizes, all right?
And it makes it super easy to do that.
Okay, so oftentimes, people will ask me,
"Why do you have so many scraps
and where do they all come from?"
Well, for one thing,
most of my scraps are not perfect strips, right?
I have scraps left over because I have a shop.
And we sell these wonderful umbrella frames.
So there's all these wedge shapes left over.
And then we sew garments and we sew bags
and we sew bucket hats and we sew...
I mean, so most of my scraps
didn't come in perfect strips, right?
So when I went to look years ago
at books on scrap quilting, I would pick up a book.
Oh, great.
This is gonna be just the answer for me.
I've got so many scraps.
And it would say,
"Cut a two and a half-inch strip times with the fabric."
And I'm like, "Mmm, that's not my scrap."
My scrap is shaped really oddly.
I have a really odd-shaped scrap.
So what am I gonna do with that, right?
So I had to come up with a solution
for how I was going to use up these odd-shaped scraps
and ones that weren't marrying each other well, okay?
So scrap quilting is harder than regular quilting.
It is.
And the reason for that is because,
like I said before, I had stuff left over from,
you know, I always had to make the hockey quilt
when my son was in hockey, right?
So how do you put that together
with the vegetable quilt or the vegetable table runner
that you have scraps left over from, right?
They're just all weird scraps.
And it's very hard to figure out
how you're gonna make those work.
So scrap quilting is harder than going into a shop,
looking at all the fabrics in front of you,
and planning to make a quilt.
Imagine if it's,
it's kind of like if you're going
to the grocery store versus going to your pantry
'cause it's snowing really hard
and you don't wanna go to the store
or you just got outta the garden
and you're a sweaty mess, blah, blah, blah.
You don't wanna go to the grocery store.
You're gonna look to see what you've got in the house.
What can I make for dinner?
And that's what scrap quilting is like.
It's very, very different.
So you have to try to make do with what you've got.
And it's kind of an inductive
versus deductive reasoning skill, right?
It's two very different things.
All right, so we are going to talk
about how you're going to attack this mess, right?
You've got this big mess of scraps.
What are we gonna do?
How many of you are savers?
Can you all see that slide?
[audience laughing]
So this is the kind of household I grew up in.
We saved absolutely everything.
And so I'm the queen of having saved all these things
that probably, well, I shouldn't.
I'm not gonna say shouldn't be saved
because I did make good use of a lot of 'em.
So here, we'll go, just go through my books.
Okay, so there's the template.
All right?
So that's what we use for cutting the scraps.
And it has a three and a half,
a four and a half, and a five and a half-inch mark.
Now, if you have these sizes already at home, fine, great.
That'll work for you just fine.
Or if you have a big ruler
and you wanna cut 'em into these sizes, that's fine.
But there is a reason why these three sizes
of squares work very, very well together.
Now, before we get into the nitty gritty
of the color selection for them,
I'm gonna show you the cutting techniques
that are used repeatedly to create these quilts.
'Cause they're all, most of them are made
with very, very similar cutting techniques.
So once you do one or two, you're just on a roll.
So first, you're gonna find your scraps.
Now, that doesn't look like a very odd-shaped scrap.
But it's a piece that was left over from something.
You're gonna take your scraps.
You're gonna have two layers of a one color or a dark.
And then two layers of a light color, okay?
Or a coordinating color.
So you have two layers of them.
So you're going to take your iron.
Everybody can see my messy sewing room in the background.
Take your iron and iron out those scraps, right?
So just take 'em right outta the bin.
Don't try to square 'em up first.
That kind of thing.
Just take your iron out and iron 'em up.
And then you're going to lay the template
over the top of all four layers.
You can see that there are two of that pink,
two layers of the pink, and two layers of the red.
All right?
So I'm gonna cut out that square.
And that's a five and a half-inch square.
All right?
Once I have that all cut, my edges are cut off.
And this is why I'm saying you don't have
to square it up or anything first
because if you have to take your scrap out,
square it all up, cut it into strips,
you're probably just gonna reach
for a new piece of fabric rather than...
Okay, so we have lines marked here.
There's the three and a half-inch line.
So I'm gonna take that three and a half-inch line,
and you can see that I have it.
Let's see.
I'm gonna bring the cursor down so you can see it better.
Here we go.
You can see that I have that cursor right there, okay?
Right on that edge.
All right?
And now, I'm gonna cut on the edge of the template.
So I'm cutting a rectangle, right?
'Cause I have cut the three and a half-inch edge
on the edge of the fabric and I'm cutting a rectangle.
Now, I've got that cut and moved to the side.
All right?
Now, I'm gonna take the three and a half-inch square
part of it.
Do you see how I have the template laid there
with the three and a half-inch square
on the edges of that fabric?
Does this make sense to everybody so far?
All right, and I'm just gonna slice across the top.
Now, all your cutting for this block is done.
Completely done.
And this block gets used
in about 12 million different layouts, right?
So you're gonna go home
and you're gonna find your own layouts
for this basic technique, okay?
Now, what are we gonna do with those?
Well, we're gonna lay them out like a four patch, okay?
So we've alternated the squares.
All right, we've taken them outta the pile.
And we're alternating the reds and the pinks.
And there's our rectangles.
They're still in a stack.
And now, we're going to sew the red to the pink.
The red to the pink.
We're using a quarter-inch seam.
Pink to the red.
And pink to the red.
Now, we haven't sewn the squares together yet.
All we've done is sewn those rectangles to the squares.
And that's all we've done so far.
So now, we're going
to stitch the long rectangles to the sides.
And you can see, there's a little bit left over there
because we made that quarter-inch seam.
So you just trim off that little tab,
trim that off, and continue to sew it together.
And there's your block.
All right?
Now, that block is called the treasure box block.
And that block gets repeatedly used
over and over and over in these quilts.
So once you figure out how to do that,
I'm gonna show you examples
of the quilts where I've used this
and how many different layouts that they are.
So that gives you a plan right there
as to how you can cut those scraps up
into five and a half-inch squares,
store 'em away somewhere.
And you know that you can make this block repeatedly.
Now, this block can be made so quickly.
And how many months is a baby in the womb?
It's in the womb for nine months.
And we all know it, right?
But we wait until the night before.
"Oh, she's gone into labor.
Ah, I better start that quilt, right?"
So this is going to be the one that you can get done
so quickly using some really fun fabrics, right?
Okay, now the next technique that I'm gonna show,
that was the treasure box block.
This one is blended hexagons, okay?
So again, I've used the same fabric for simplicity reasons.
So I have three five and a half-inch squares of pink
and three five and a half-inch squares of red.
All right?
Now, I'm gonna pair them up.
And they're gonna be right sides together.
And I'm gonna keep the pink on the top each time, okay?
So they're paired up, right sides together.
And I've stacked them now.
You can see the red one is underneath that pink one.
And they're underneath all three like that.
Then I make a mark from the upper left in
and then a mark on the lower right in,
and I connect that mark
with my quilting ruler and I slash it.
All right?
And I do that to all three of 'em.
And then I don't even take 'em apart.
I go over to my sewing machine
and I stitch down that long non-bias edge of that.
And that's the shape you get, okay?
So when you put six of those together,
all of 'em from that we just cut,
you get this wonderful hexagon.
So that's how that hexagon is made from squares.
So I'll show people that quilt
and I'll say, "That quilt was made from squares."
And they'll go, "No."
And I say, "Yes."
It's not a complicated wedge ruler.
It's just made from squares.
Then you appliqué something over the center.
Your wool, or, you know,
if you're great at putting appliqué circles onto things.
If you're not, join the club.
I'm not good at it either. [audience laughing]
All right, so that is called the blended hexagon block.
That one too has about a million different ways
in which that can be used.
All right?
So why do these sizes work so well together?
Three and a half, four and a half,
and five and a half all have a least common multiple
of 60, okay?
And that is a good number in quilting, right?
So if you're going to use three and a half
and five and a half-inch squares,
you know that 15 is the least common multiple.
If you're going to use four and a half
and five and a half-inch squares,
you know the 20 is the least common multiple,
and so on and so forth.
So that too gives you a way
to plan and to think ahead, right?
So I did not say to you when you walked in here
that there would be no math.
But I'm giving you the math, all right?
That's why they work so well.
And I like the fact
that an acrylic template can be used
like a cookie cutter, right?
Doesn't matter what your scrap looks like.
You can just plunk it down and cut around it, all right?
Just like when you roll out the dough
and the kid wants to stick the cookie cutter
right in the center of the dough.
All right, so here's the big meat of it all.
The organization of scraps.
I prefer to organize mine in terms of color, all right?
Color is one of the most feared things amongst quilters.
I own a quilt shop,
and I have people come in all the time
and say that they're not good
with putting the colors together.
But it's not true.
You guys are all probably way better than you think.
You really, really are.
And you just gotta kind of shake it out and get over that.
I organize mine in clear tubs, okay?
I have clear tubs that I throw the scraps into
when I'm finished making something according
to the predominant background color, okay?
The predominant background color.
All right?
So being a good health care worker,
I have an algorithm that I use.
So I created this scrap organization tree.
All right?
So the scrap color, like I said,
is how you're going to separate them.
And you're going to use the predominant background color.
Now, this is how I do it.
I have boxes for red, pink, orange,
yellow, green, blue, purple.
Black and white goes in a bin.
Even if there's more black and less white
or more white and less black,
all the black and whites go in a bin, all right?
And then I have, like, a backgrounds box.
And you all know what I'm talking about, right?
Things that you,
I've seen, like, millions of 'em today at the show.
Things that make good backgrounds.
Like this.
This kind of thing, right?
Backgrounds, they kind of all go into one bin,
whether they're leaning more white
or they're leaning more beige.
Doesn't matter.
If to me, it says a background, that's what I do.
Now, this could be completely different for you.
I wanna just tell you my technique
so that you are not paralyzed
if you need a technique for scrap quilting, okay?
And then I have a bin for brown.
But I also, I should alter this slide, and I never have.
I also now have a bin that I put grays.
I separate the grays out too.
And I have a bin for gray.
All right?
So then because we're not doing question and answer in here,
usually, the next question that I get from people is,
"What do you consider to be a scrap?"
Okay, well, how many of us have a fat quarter
that we've cut a big chunk out of
because we want that piece of fabric
for something in our quilt.
And what do we do with the rest of the fat quarter, right?
So I don't wanna fold it up
and put it back with the fat quarters
because then when I need a full fat quarter,
I'm gonna go in there and pull it out
and it's not gonna be a full fat quarter, right?
So some of those fat quarters
that I cut those big chunks out of get put into the bins.
All right?
Last couple days ago, I was making a shirt for my son.
And it was Essex woven.
So it's the same on both sides.
And it's got a continuous lap in the sleeve to make a cuff.
You wonder where I'm going with this story.
Because it was the same on both sides,
I made two right sleeves.
So that whole sleeve, one whole sleeve,
instead of ripping it apart, and I couldn't rip it apart
'cause the continuous lapping, now that's a scrap, right?
So that's going in the scrap bin.
How about those pieces that are left over
from the edges of your quilts,
all that stuff.
I put 'em in the bin.
I don't agonize over cutting them up into the right size.
I'm only organizing right now by color.
That's all I'm doing is organizing by color.
All right?
So anything like that is a scrap.
All right?
Now, the next thing
is I have my scraps all organized in these bins.
Oh, and the other thing I wanna say too about the bins,
let's go back to the bins for just a second,
is let's say you have a scrap
and you don't know if it's blue or it's green, right?
We're all gonna have these moments
where we're looking at some of these colors
and we're gonna say,
"Oh, does it go blue or does it go green?"
Don't split hairs initially
when you're putting your scraps away, okay?
If you don't know what color it is, sorry, ask a man.
[audience laughing] Because they're not,
I can't even imagine my husband looking
at a scrap for a really long time
and trying to decide what color it is.
He's gonna look at it for 0.2 seconds
and he's gonna tell me, "Well, it's blue."
Or, "That's green."
Okay, settles it.
I'll put it in that tub.
All right, so.
So the next thing.
After we have our scraps all sorted into bins,
now we're going to determine what are we going to do.
What color are we going to make this quilt?
We've all made quilts that are painful to make
because someone asked us to make a quilt
and we hate the color or, you know,
the color combination was wrong or whatever
and you just can't stand it.
So I would suggest that you limit those experiences.
[all laughing]
I like to use a color wheel.
Now, some people are naturally very good at color.
They were born with it.
I was not, okay?
Thirty-some years ago,
she moved in close to my house across from a playground.
We got to know each other really, really well.
And we would make the same quilt.
And she would show me hers and I would show mine.
And it was like, ugh.
Like, hers was always really, really good.
And my colors weren't as good.
So I knew I had to come up with some type of a algorithm
or some type of way that was reliable that I could,
'cause I'm not naturally good at it, right?
But the more you do it, the better you get.
So I started thinking, hmm, the color wheel.
That is not something I invented.
I did not reinvent the wheel, ha ha ha.
So that is something that is based in science
and it's been around forever, right?
It's been around forever.
All these color theories, they've been around forever.
They're not something new.
Light goes through a prism.
It creates that.
I didn't create that.
That's nature, right?
So let's use nature to help us along.
Now, if you get nothing else
out of this lecture, just remember.
The human eye loves color order.
When you go through the show, what grabs your eye?
Those rainbow packs.
They always grab your eye.
When things are even in a section of a rainbow,
it always grabs your eye.
That color order is very attractive to people.
People love color order.
Poor dogs; they only see gray and white.
So this is what I came up with to help me.
And I hope that it helps you.
You may decide it doesn't.
I don't know, but I hope it helps you.
I have broken it down to the four methods
that I will use when I do my scrap quilts.
Now, there are lots of other color theories
besides just these four,
but this four helps me to be organized
and to think the process through.
So I always start out with my favorite color.
But, you know, your favorite color changes
from time to time, right?
I mean, some days you're really into, you know, blue,
or sometimes you're really into green,
or most of the time, I'm into orange.
That's my favorite color.
But there are days
that I just wanna do something navy blue, right?
So pick your favorite color
or pick the color that, or the fabric.
Pick the color or the fabric
that makes your heart sing, makes you super happy.
Life is too short to use fabrics
that don't make you happy, right?
So pick something that you love.
All right?
Then you're going to pick up your color wheel.
All right?
And this looks super scary.
But we're going to break this down.
All right, now on there,
it says, "Consider tints and shades."
A tint is nothing more than a color with white added.
A shade is nothing more than a color with black added.
Every single piece of fabric that you have
in your arsenal will be on this color wheel.
I promise you, okay?
I design fabrics for Studio E Fabrics.
And I have turned in some things that you draw on the computer
and they will say, "Well, we can't do that color,"
or, "We can't do that color."
And that's because fabric companies,
well, it's while we're still screen printing most
of our prints, a lot of 'em are digitally printed.
So some of this is gonna change.
But they will fall in this color wheel.
So if you ever look at Mobus Fabrics,
most of them are pretty formulaic.
They mostly have the same colors
per designer each time they come out.
Michael Miller always has the same formulas.
So I promise you that they are not going to make colors
that are so esoteric that they just,
they're not gonna do it, right?
It's too expensive.
They've got formulas that they follow.
So every single one of your fabrics will fall in here, okay?
It might not be one of these,
but I bet, and I guarantee, it's gonna be one of these
in that cone of shade or the cone of tint.
All right?
So this is the color
and this is the shade and this is the tint.
And it's gonna fall in to any of those.
All right?
Okay, so that's what we're talking about
when we say consider tints and shades
because if this is blue, these are also blue.
And these are blue as well.
So you've got a lot to pick from, okay?
So then these are the four.
Now, my favorite is adjacent colors.
That's my favorite color scheme.
Now, in there, I have split complementary.
And with that, I guess I would make another little line
under there and say triadic.
Because if you've ever seen a equilateral triangle laid
over a color wheel and at whatever point it touches,
those three colors go well together.
Again, not something I invented.
This is something for decades, you know,
that people know that these colors go well together.
So use that knowledge.
Use that ability.
So let's talk about picking out colors, all right?
So let's talk about a monochromatic color scheme.
So you go to those.
You've got all your tubs of fabric separated.
It doesn't matter what the print is, all right?
If it's blue, it's in the blue tub.
If it's green, it's in the green tub.
There are going to be some prints
that are going to be very, very hard to separate out
and decide what color they are, right?
We've got prints that are difficult like this.
Although the predominant color here is yellow,
there's still a whole lot of color in that.
So I have one extra separate tub that I haven't told you about.
[audience laughing]
That's called the husband bin. [audience laughing]
And the reason for that is because you loved it once,
when you bought it, right?
You fell in love with that piece of fabric.
And then you've used it for many years.
You've kept it around.
And then you've picked it out and you've said,
"I really don't know what color you are,
"or what you even belong to, or I can't figure you out,
so you are going in the husband bin."
So I have a bin that is just for those fabrics
that are too hard to figure out.
But there are quilts here in this whole collection
that use fabrics from the husband bin, all right?
And there's a whole theory behind the husband bin.
So let's start with monochromatic, okay?
So if you wanna make a monochromatic quilt,
here's where you're gonna start splitting hairs a little bit.
Remember when I said you separate those out?
You're not gonna be splitting hairs.
Let's say you wanna do blue, okay?
So I'm gonna grab the blue right here.
You don't have to just--
So you're gonna take that little bubble
and you're gonna lay it up against a scrap, okay?
Lay it up against a scrap to make sure.
Is it blue or is it leaning green?
So see, this scrap right there leans a little green.
That scrap leans, that's not blue.
So you're just gonna lay your scraps on there, all right?
And don't forget.
You've got this whole entire cone under here, all right?
That you can pull out your scraps from the bins
and use the shades and the tints under there
as well if you're making a monochromatic quilt.
So I'm gonna show you a first example
using the treasure box block.
And this is in my first book
inJust Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
This is a monochromatic-- Should we go over there with it?
Kind of? Yeah.
This is a monochromatic quilt.
Let's see, get it up nice and high.
This is a monochromatic quilt.
Why is this a monochromatic quilt?
Because brown is simply a shade of orange.
Now, you can, now, does that mean
that you can't use those fabrics
when the prints have different colors?
'Cause these prints, some of them have blue in it,
but the predominant background color was orange, okay?
So I went to my bin,
pulled out the oranges and the browns.
And this has a lot of fabrics.
Let's walk over this way a little bit with it too.
This, be careful, don't fall!
This quilt has a lot of fabrics in it
that you would think would not marry well to each other.
You would think that they won't marry each other well.
'Cause there's some elephants in there.
There's some Civil War prints in there.
There's some really wild flowers and some butterflies.
And they're very, very different.
But what do you see when you look at this?
You see color.
You see, then you see form, right?
And then you start to really look at the quilt, okay?
So this is a monochromatic quilt.
All right?
So you could do this with anything with shades and tints.
Any one color with shades and tints.
So let's look at another monochromatic quilt.
This one is inQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers.
Now, this one, I'm calling "Payson."
This one is called "Payson."
And it looks like trees.
There's a big long story as to why I call it "Payson."
But it's that blue-green color in shades and tints
of that one same blue-green color.
And you can see how fun it is
to play with the shades and tints, right?
Just move them in different places.
I would suggest laying the quilt out
in a room where the light changes throughout the day
and where you have to look at it
a million times walking back and forth,
which is usually outside the bathroom.
And then maybe on the hundredth time that you walk by,
you're gonna pick up that scrap
and you're gonna go, "Nope, don't like that one in there."
Right?
So this also is a monochromatic quilt.
And you can see.
I wasn't really limited to just one color.
Thank you.
This is a monochromatic quilt.
And it's obvious that it's monochromatic
because it's just browns.
And again, with that one,
we married a lot of different fabrics in that one
that you would normally think would not go together.
This is monochromatic.
Oops, it's upside-down.
It's houndstooth.
And houndstooth is a fun pattern.
I love houndstooth.
Comes in and out of vogue quite a bit.
But again, some very formal fabrics.
Some very fun, juvenile fabrics all go well in here.
Now, with monochromatic quilts or with any quilts,
you can always add a neutral, right?
So I've added these neutrals in here,
which gives it kind of a stopping point.
This is in my first book, Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
And it just really definitely made short work of my browns.
And there were definitely browns that lean more orange
because of the shading and the tints.
And that too uses only the three and a half,
the four and a half, and the five and a half-inch square.
This is fromQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers.
This is basically monochromatic
and there are some neutrals in here.
So monochromatic with neutrals, right?
So we're sticking with our blues that are really very blue
and don't move toward green.
All right, so this isQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers.
And this, like I said,
is very much blues in shades and tints.
This way, I took the shades up here,
moved down, and put the tints down at the bottom.
And it used up a lot of scraps that again,
you would not think there's octopuses with florals,
with little egg cups, with, you know,
butterflies, telephones,
all kinds of different things in here.
And that is just using blues.
All right.
Okay, so that kind of covers,
I've got a lot more monochromatic ones,
but I really do wanna talk to you
about my favorite color scheme to do,
and that's adjacent scrap quilts.
Most of my quilts are adjacent.
Most of them fall in that adjacent category.
And adjacent simply means that you are going
to be using colors in the color wheel
that are next to each other.
Now, there's no number that's a magic number for this.
Again, like I said, it's color order.
So you can use as many or as few as you'd like.
Now, when you look at the quilt right here
that's behind Cathy, this one is that blended hexagon.
And when you look at it initially,
you might think that it is monochromatic.
But it's an adjacent color scheme.
And what I used was anything
from fuchsia almost all the way to yellow.
But I think I stopped at golden yellow.
And I pulled the colors from there
and used all of these colors
and tints and shades and was able to marry a lot
of odd scraps in there that ordinarily,
you wouldn't think went well together.
Now, there are Civil War reproductions in there.
There are Tula Pink.
There are Kaffes.
There are all kinds of things in that quilt.
And they just work very well together.
They have kind of a blended effect.
So depending on how you lay them,
you'll get a blending effect.
And like I said, you can lay them in a place
where the light changes throughout the day.
Now that quilt, I was gonna say about that.
Ah, skip.
I'll think of it.
I'll think of it later.
Another adjacent color scheme quilt is this one right here.
And this one is,
so that one is inRainbow Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
This one is inSensational Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
Now, this is an adjacent color scheme as well.
And the great story about this quilt
is that my daughter was pregnant
and she came to my house and was crying
'cause she was nesting and she had, you know,
hormones were raging and all this stuff.
And she said, "I don't have any room for all this fabric.
"What am I gonna do with it?
We gotta get ready for the baby," blah, blah, blah,
as only a daughter can do to a mother, right?
So she proceeds to bring in all her tubs of fabric
into my foyer and dumps them,
and then says to me, "But don't use any of 'em."
[audience laughing]
Well, guess what?
I did, and this is the quilt I made.
And so someday, she'll get it. [audience laughing]
But, so this is an adjacent color scheme.
This too is,
this is inSensational Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
This uses just squares.
And it is a very easy, again, slash and cut technique.
Very easy.
But what you see in this,
and there are neutrals in here too,
but what you see in this is elongated hexagons, right?
You see diamond shapes.
You see all kinds of different patterns in this.
And that's what's really fun about scrap quilts is so often,
depending on how you're looking at it,
you're gonna see a primary design,
a secondary design, and a tertiary design.
And that's really fun.
And you can see from that quilt
how many different fabrics we married
and were able to make work.
Now, look at this color wheel.
And this is where we were with that.
We were from chartreuse all the way down to blue violet.
All of those in there.
And we pulled all of those scraps
and put them into that quilt with a neutral, okay?
With a neutral.
So it's a great way to disguise a lot of different prints.
This quilt right here is made using the husband bucket.
The important thing about quilts where you use the husband bucket
is that you must have eye rest, okay?
You need to have eye rest.
So if you're going to use a lot of wild
and bright prints all together in one quilt
without a scheme in mind, you have to have eye rest.
So my eye rest comes in right in here.
All right, these are neutrals.
This one is inRainbow Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
This is what I call the use of blanks.
And I like to use that technique
in my scrap quilts because it A, gives eye rest,
and it also gives dimension to a quilt.
So I could have easily pieced these, okay?
I could have easily pieced those and put in solid triangles,
solid Kona white, or Kona snow, or gray, or whatever.
But instead of doing that,
I pieced them identical to these, okay?
So that's another technique for use,
not just using up your scraps,
but for giving it some dimension and giving it eye rest.
So let's look at that more closely.
This use of blanks.
'Cause you could use this not just
with quilts from my books, but quilts from any book, right?
So if you were making "Lady of the Lake"
and you pieced a block of "Lady of the Lake"
and you wanted another block next to it,
instead of just having a solid block,
piece that same block in neutrals.
So this is,
I picked the ugliest fabrics I could possibly find
for this example.
I picked the ugliest ones I could possibly come up with.
Right, it looks fine because I pieced the ones in between.
Instead of just putting solid rectangles in there,
I pieced the ones in between.
This little pattern is in the first book,
Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
But I pieced the ones in between and gave it some eye rest.
And also, this quilt right here
is a perfect example of the use of blanks.
Now, I'm going to move the slides along
'cause I wanna show you.
These are all different layouts for the treasure box.
But we're gonna skip ahead.
And there we go.
Okay, so sometimes computers
turn these things the wrong colors.
So this block right here.
Let's see, right here.
This is the basic block.
That's the basic block of this next quilt.
I promise you that
that basic block was made using a three and a half,
a four and a half, and a five and a half-inch square.
Okay? Oops.
So instead of...
I've got all these.
This is the cover quilt for Quilts for Scrap Lovers,okay?
So I've got all these blocks
in here of all these different colors.
All right?
I've grouped them, another technique.
I've grouped them.
Here are my blues.
Here are my greens that kind of lean blue
and they're a tint, okay?
But this is my basic block right here, okay?
It's my basic block.
So when I lay, and this basic block, when you make it,
also can be laid out 5 million different ways, right?
So instead of putting a solid block
of Kona snow or white,
I've just pieced that exact same block.
And it's a great technique.
So it's a great technique
for adding more dimension to your quilts.
Now, look at this one here.
This has got salad mixed in with,
there's a hockey square over here.
There's sea animals over there.
There's, you know, much more formal pieces.
This is like a red, white, and blue, and some pears.
So when you look at this, what do you see?
You see color.
Then you start to zero in on the pattern, right?
I always think that at a quilt show,
an award should be given to the quilt
that people stare at the longest.
It doesn't have to be the best quilt.
It just has to be the one that people stop and stare at.
So all the, what do you call those?
Docents or the volunteers that are in
and amongst all the quilts
to make sure you're not touching 'em,
they should be keeping track
of which quilts stopped people dead in their tracks, right?
Most of the time, I bet it's a scrap quilt.
Now, I need to tell you that this quilt right here
is identical to this quilt right here.
It's the same quilt.
You guys seeing it?
Same exact cutting technique.
Same exact quilt.
[audience murmuring] Right?
Same exact quilt.
Got it?
Seeing it now?
All right.
Let's look at an adjacent,
another adjacent color scheme, okay?
It's adjacent colors with a neutral, all right?
So this one is inQuilts nfor Scrap Lovers,my first book.
And this one uses that treasure box technique
on the bottom with half square triangles at the top.
All right?
So again, this is a really ugly piece.
It's, like, purple zebra.
Like, really?
And so it's an adjacent color scheme.
There's some plums down there.
There's some wild big jacks up here.
But again, it's an adjacent color scheme
with some eye rest in there, okay?
So with this one,
oh, there's the tomato fabric down there,
the big ugly tomatoes.
So with this one,
where did we go on the color wheel?
Well, I went to my bin
and I found anything from fuchsia to yellow.
Fuchsia to yellow.
And then added a neutral, okay?
Because the human eye does love color order.
And because these are bigger swaths of color,
it does help when you have larger swaths
to add some eye rest.
This one here is also an adjacent color scheme.
Now, remember the one I told you the story
about with my daughter?
This is the exact same quilt.
This one is inQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers.
Also using just a very basic square and a slash technique.
This is called "Pink Diamonds."
And this is an adjacent color scheme, but using only tints.
So I went to my pink and orange buckets
and used only tints and a neutral.
And look.
It's the same exact quilt, but it looks very different.
The diamonds are much more predominant
than the elongated hexagons.
So this one, I did do on my domestic machine
'cause it's quilt-as-you-go.
Oh, thank you.
All right.
So, now the one thing I don't talk about a lot,
because I don't use it a lot,
is those are all different layouts, like I said,
for just that basic treasure box block.
Okay, so this is also,
this quilt behind me is an adjacent color scheme.
All right?
This uses the treasure box block and a half square triangle.
So it's the exact same motions,
the exact same blocks as the house one,
the house divided one that I just showed you.
It's exactly the same.
But I used, I didn't use scraps.
I used a solid Kona in this one.
This one is also inQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers.
But that's an adjacent color scheme
using blue-reds to,
there might be a few turquoises in there.
Yeah, there are, all the way to almost aqua blue.
All right, so that is also an adjacent.
And again, like I said, because it's a larger swath,
I'm using a little bit more eye rest in there.
All right, so where was I going?
Oh, we were going to talk about complementary
and split complementary color schemes
because I don't use those a lot
'cause they're much more difficult.
All right?
The reason they're difficult
is because now you've added a whole 'nother dimension to it
because you have to decide
when those colors are farther apart on the color wheel,
where are you gonna lay them?
How is that going to work?
You know, how are you gonna lay those out?
At least for me, it adds another dimension
and a much more difficult dimension.
So I want you to look at this quilt
and I want you to look at this quilt.
And I'm gonna show you a split complementary,
which is the exact same quilt as those two.
Okay, it's the exact same quilt.
And this is
inSensational Quilts for Scrap Lovers,all right?
So you can see, and I used a gray as a neutral.
So they weren't background scraps,
but I used the neutral gray to help give that some eye rest
because they're on opposite sides of the color wheel.
And it is much more difficult.
But you can see a lot
of different designs in this, can't you?
You can see tumblers.
You can see diamonds.
You can see hexagons.
If you look really hard, you can see hexagons.
And so some of these, that's why it's just,
it's not only fun to play with the color.
It's really, really fun to just lay them out
and have them sitting out for a long time
and look at them repeatedly
when the light changes throughout the course of the day
so that you can get a good grip
on how and where you wanna lay these.
So let's say you wanna practice this.
One day, Cathy and I put our,
sat on the floor with our buckets of scraps
and we were going to do a color line, so to speak.
And we took the green bucket,
which remember, we didn't split hairs.
We just threw green into green.
And if you want to learn and sharpen your eye
at splitting hairs like that,
remember the number lines where you had zero in school
and then it went to the negatives
and then it went to the positives
and it was up above the chalkboard
or the blackboard or whatever?
You can do the same kind of thing with color.
So you find something
that's really green, green, all right?
So you find your green bubble.
And you lay your scraps out and find the greenest green.
And this is really fun to do with a guild, all right?
So find your greenest green and then pull out the greens
that lean more yellow; I'm going this direction.
Lay them in piles on the table.
And then the greens that lean in this direction
and lay them in piles on the table.
And you can do that with every single color.
You can do with yellow.
You can do it with red.
The reds that lean more blue
and the reds that lean more yellow
because then that becomes orange.
You can do that with any of these colors.
And so if you have a guild or a group of friends,
ask everybody to bring in just their green scraps
or just their red scraps.
And it really gives you an appreciation,
if nothing else, for how many different colors of green
you probably have in your scraps.
And how then that can help you to arrange them in a quilt.
So this is just a little exercise
that you can do very quickly.
I put the white in the center.
And then I found the yellowest yellow.
Now, a yellow yellow, just a true, plain,
yes, is hard, hard to find in quilt shops.
Almost everything is a shade.
Therefore, leaning gold, right?
Or orange.
Therefore it's hard to find a lemon yellow.
I call it lemon yellow.
So you find that.
And you find greens that lean yellow
and yellows that lean green
'cause they're two different things.
And then you find blues or greens,
I'm sorry, just regular green.
And then greens that lean blue and blues that lean green.
It's just a fun little exercise to do.
Make a table runner or whatever you wanna do with it.
And it just sharpens your eye
because once you have that color order going,
it won't matter what your prints are.
You can just put prints together
unless they're wildly inappropriate, right?
Then you wouldn't put it together.
So an example of the ultimate adjacent color scheme quilt
is the cover quilt forRainbow Quilts for Scrap Lovers,
which is, let's see, where's the red?
The red is in the upper corner.
Red should be in the, there we go.
Red should be in the upper corner.
This is packages, boxes, and bows.
And this just uses that treasure box technique of cutting.
All right, so you start with your reds.
You move with your reds that lean more orange.
And then your oranges that lean red.
And then to orange.
Then orange that leans yellow.
And yellow that leans orange.
You get my point, right?
So you go all the way through, down to the bottom.
And then it won't matter what your print is.
And you can just put them together.
And you can do this with any pattern,
with any pattern from any book, any pattern that's out there,
is to do this kind of directional color.
And it makes just for a very beautiful quilt.
Now, again, if you don't wanna think,
and this is fromQuilt As-You-Go for Scrap Lovers.
If you don't wanna think too hard,
you can always do something like this,
which is very similar to the one
that I showed you when I was talking
about the use of blanks.
And you can just put your colors of your scraps into rows
and then make sure that you've got enough eye rest
for those larger, bolder, wilder prints.
Because there's a lot of different colors
going on in here, you're gonna need a little eye rest.
You don't want your eyes
doing like the googly eyes kind of thing,
spinning in circles.
So this is another very good one
to use up a lot of scraps in a way that's organized,
in a way that you can think through.
Another example of that is this one here.
And this is inSensational Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
This uses the exact same cutting technique.
I'm gonna keep referring to it as the pregnant daughter story.
Exact same cutting technique,
only using smaller squares, all right?
And neutrals.
Now, I had a lot of grays left over.
I forget what project it was that I was doing.
And I used a ton of grays.
So I had a lot of them left over.
And so then I put them in between the bars of color
using that exact same cutting technique.
So it kind of has a fractured appearance.
We should say with the eight minutes left,
that owl's well that ends well.
Owl's well that ends well. [audience awwwing]
This is inRainbow Quilts for Scrap Lovers.
So you can also do pictorial scrap quilts if you'd like.
You can make things that are objects using your scraps.
Think about that.
Not a lot of people think about that.
They think that when they're doing a scrap quilt,
that they have to find a pattern like any of these, right,
to make a scrap quilt, but you really don't have to.
I did a scrap quilt that was a mermaid.
And I just used scraps.
And again, I went to my green bin
and found green for the tail and red for the hair.
And you can make pictorial scrap quilts as well.
That's something to really think about with your scraps.
Now, I always get the question from people
that they'll say, "Well, do you, like,
"have the whole thing planned out first?
Or do you, how do you go about starting this whole thing?"
So I'm gonna show you what I did in the last night.
I did this last night, okay?
I decided, 'cause I'm in a navy blue phase of my life,
and I'm really getting low on neutral scraps.
I really, really am.
And so this is what I started.
This is the treasure box block, okay?
This is the same thing as,
remember I showed you all those other ones,
all those different layouts when we went through this?
So it's the same block as that.
It's the first one that I demonstrated, right?
Okay, so this is treasure box block.
So you can see the positive,
negative kind of vibe going on here.
And I've got all these navy blue ones.
So now I'm gonna look at it for a while.
And I'm gonna decide whether I want
to slowly move from blue out to tints
or am I going to move from blue to green?
And this is kind of how I do it.
This is how I work.
I don't get in a rush, unless there's a baby coming
and then you have to, right?
It's the next day.
But you know, don't be in a rush with your scraps.
Really savor them.
And, you know, I would be interested
to hear what you would do with this next.
What do you think you would do?
Where would you move?
Where would the next thing be that you would move to?
What would be the next outer ring
or how would you go about doing the next?
And that's how I do it when I do my scrap quilts.
I never do a whole bunch of blocks at once.
I start with one
and then I just kind of move outward.
Decide what color scheme I wanna do.
And I just kind of move outward.
It's kind of a process that happens by the seat of my pants.
But those are the four that I use.
This is the treasure box block.
And this is in every single one of the books.
So it is definitely in every single one of the books
for lots of different designs using this.
So we should probably have questions and answers
since I don't have that much time left.
She wanted to know when I'm putting my colors into my bin,
am I only looking at the background color?
Yes, so the predominant background color is what I use.
If there is something in there that is a background color
and there's so much color in there,
then no, it doesn't go in that bin.
Then it probably goes in the husband bin.
That's...
- Audience Member 1: Yeah, so the husband bin.
You told us about the husband bin,
but you didn't explain the husband bin.
- Yeah, I said if it's too wild and too wooly--
- Audience Member 1: So you have the yellow
with a orange or with a red tomato.
- Right, right.
- Audience Member 1: So what is the husband,
does the husband do something with that?
Does he say... [audience laughing]
- No, he's not allowed in my room.
It's called a husband bin because they're weird.
[audience laughing]
Right, I don't know what to do with you.
[audience laughing]
Okay, you had a question.
- Audience Member 2: You talked about quilt-as-you-go.
Can you explain a little more how that name came about?
- Sure, she said quilt-as-you-go.
So quilt-as-you-go is a method
in which you will take your quilt
and you'll only build it in sections.
So let's say I have this and I have four other sections
and I just don't join them.
I just leave them.
And then I put my batting
and my backing behind every single section.
Then I quilt it on my domestic machine.
And then there are several different techniques,
methods of joining them
so that you're joining them once they're quilted.
- Audience Member 3: How come you don't have any border
on any of your quilts?
- No borders. - Audience Member 3: No borders.
- It's just a trend right now, right?
So 20 years from now,
everybody will be bordering their quilts.
Right now, the trend is that people don't border them much.
That's just the fashion.
It's the trend.
I just really like them,
the looks of them without the border.
But ask me in 20 years,
if the good Lord gives me 20 more years,
I'll probably be putting borders back on.
Yes.
- Audience Member 4: Male perspective.
[audience laughing]
Depending, to answer your question
what I would do with that,
it depends on how big I'm going to make that quilt.
- Okay.
- You know, if it's going to get, if it's king size,
then I would probably gradate out the colors,
going out as far as I could.
My comment is I taught elementary school.
And I was used to red, yellow, and blue.
- Yeah. - Now we have a color wheel
that is magenta, yellow, and cyan.
- Yeah, yeah. [audience laughing]
- So now we've got two to deal with.
- Yes, we do; I know.
That's the same thing with borders.
Like, right?
Like, in ten years from now,
they're gonna change the wording all over again.
Yes, back there.
- Audience Member 5: I'm not clear about complementary.
Is that the triangle and split?
- Okay, yes.
So on the back of this color wheel, it's all diagram.
You know those four that are up there?
Look at every single one of these dots
and all four of these will be underneath it, okay?
So complementary is always opposites.
Always opposites, okay?
Split complementary can be one that's here
and then three or four on the side,
or it can be three or four here and three or four here.
And then there's triadic,
which I also lump under split complementary
because if you laid an equilateral triangle
on this color wheel, then science will tell you
that those colors are appealing to the eye.
No matter how you turned that triangle, that's triadic.
But I always lump that under because I find that one
as equally difficult to put together
as the complementary ones.
Wrap it up? Okay.
Thank you everybody.
And I'll have stuff out there, okay?
[audience applauding]
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Your financial gift helps make this event possible.
Thank you.
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