Back at the Red Bar Ranch…June 2012

Well before I got engrossed in Randy’s sow along (I have 45 blocks now) I was contemplating what to do with this bunch of leftover red strips.

I had this brainstorm that I could sew them together and then cut them up into 6” block units.

And make blocks like these…

That worked pretty well except that the diagonal cuts got to be a bit long.

 I know what you are thinking, that’s a lot of bias; but, I have always found that as long as you don’t yank at the edges too much all will be well (and square).

Red #2- 49″ x 49″

The blocks are a little wonky ’cause I had some problems with the long cuts.  But this method does whip up enough units to make a decent sized lap quilt in a jiffy. You may be wondering, ‘Why all the red strips?’.  Many years ago I wanted to make a quilt  for my friend Lianna.  When I asked her what kind of quilt she would like she said she did not care what style it was just that it had to be red.  This was quite a challenge for me, I had never made an all red quilt before but I figured if it was going to be one color I was going to vary the shades of that one color as much as possible, to make it more interesting.  I bought a lot of ‘reds’. Cut a lot of red strips and accumulated a lot of red strips.

Alas,  all that experimentation lead to more scraps.  But scraps are my favorite so I made YET another scrappy Bar Quilt.

I think that blue and white batik is the perfect compliment to all that crazy red.  After that there were Still more scraps so I made some misc. pillow / wall hanging type things.

Even tho’ people normally think of red as something you add to jazz things up I think when used like this It has a very calm feeling.

And even tho’ the ‘red’ basket is not empty I think I see progress ( it use to be overflowing and now it’s just full!)

Happy June, cheers, CW