Beauty Makeover

Beauty Makeover

55" x 66"

Top started & finished - February 2022

Quilted & bound - July 2023

This quilt started off as ugly! Seriously! I had acquired some fabric that wasn't really my taste and many I would consider ugly.

I heard about taking your fabric crumbs and sewing them to adding machine tape and making strips from them. I had some machine tape that had been sitting in the desk drawer that could be put to use.

I had other projects in the works but once I started trying to whittle down my scraps, I couldn't stop working on this quilt top.

The adding machine tape helped keep my scraps from stretching or shifting as I sewed. 

Quilters often talk about if you cut up a fabric and it is still ugly, you haven't cut it small enough. I cut up the old and ugly fabric into 3 inches long x 1"-2" wide pieces and began sewing these and my other scraps/crumbs to the machine tape.

Since the tape was 2.25" in width, I added an additional 1/2" on each side when I trimmed the edges resulting in a finish of 2.75" in width so the paper was easier to remove once the blocks were sewn together.

Quite a bit of the fabric was darker, muted colors so I added splashes of yellow, orange, and red that helped "brighten" it up a bit. In makeover terms, it was the lipstick and mascara for the quilt.

I posted a photo of my quilt on two Facebook pages I follow. One of my posts received 189 comment and 1200 likes. What a high compliment that this quilt that I called my "ugly quilt" had been transformed into something others considered beautiful. It was no longer ugly fabric when mixed with the others.

The finished quilt top sat in the UFO pile for a year and a half before being quilted and bound as part of the 2023 - Finish my UFOs goal.

The backing was a multi-color print I found on the flat-fold table.

I enjoyed using my walking foot for the quilting. It was quilted diagonally. I stitched from corner to corner of the blocks and then echo stitched 1/4" away on each side of the stitching for 3 lines of stitching. I continued adding 3 lines of stitching every 6 inches. After that was completed, I went back and stitched a single line in the middle of these lines. I love the results because it isn't the traditional diagonal quilting.

It was bound with a colorful print I had picked up on the June 2023 shop hop along the Central Coast.

There is more to the story of this quilt and its popularity as told on my post - Adding a watermark

Every quilt tells a story. This is the story of my ugly quilt fabric that received a beauty makeover complete with mascara and lipstick. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

Quilting, Binding, and Backing

Every Quilt Tells A Story
Whether it is the fabrics chosen, the design, the colors, the occasion, the recipient, or the people I quilt with, every quilt tells a story. This blog captures in images and words what has been created for others and for my own home through the hum and stitching of my sewing machine.