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| Amanda Jean's slabs and strings |
Our guild lined up
Amanda Jean Nyberg, co-author of
Sunday Morning Quilts, for a workshop and I signed up immediately. I had the pleasure of interviewing her and Cheryl Arkison for
an Etsy story and really enjoyed talking with them and their entire philosophy of saving scraps. I don't know about you, but I can't throw scraps away. Actually, I'll bet that you can't either. I go through phases, where I save even the little triangles I've cut from joining binding strips. I admit that eventually I've tossed them, but now that I've had a class with Amanda Jean, I wish I hadn't!
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| My scraps |
Scraps can be overwhelming, and the goal behind
Sunday Morning Quilts is to help them be less so, to make them actually useful. Our class started with a discussion of sorting scraps (Amanda Jean and her friend Pam even brought a set of scrappy sorting boxes) and sorting our own took some time. But it did make them more useable. I was trimming some blocks I'd made from my scraps and Amanda Jean came by and there was a tiny little square—maybe 1.5 by 1.5 inches—that I'd cut off the end and she confessed that she saves even those. Her frugality is matched by her creativity, and she puts these scraps to really great uses.
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| Amanda Jean's high-and-low volume quilt, Shady |
One thing I enjoyed seeing was that even though her aesthetic is scrappy, she has a "look," a clear, colorful palette that shows up time and again in her quilts. I felt quite inspired and started with a log-cabinish block of multicolored scraps.
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| My slab |
I decided, however, to limit my palette and went for blue, green, and yellow with a bit of grey and was quite enjoying that. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with the bit I made, but I do think I'll keep at it, as I have a ton of scraps in these colors.
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| Amanda Jean laying out gum drops |
If you ever get the chance to take a workshop with Amanda Jean, don't hesitate. She's funny, friendly, and spends a lot of time walking around and talking through issues with quilters. A day well spent!
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| Scrap baskets, rug knitted from selvedges and strings, and 2.5 inch square quilt |
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| My friend Kristin's slabs. We bought that dark blue fabric together six or seven years ago and both used scraps of it in our slabs. |
