QM Scrap Squad: Spinout by Pat

Today’s featured Scrap Squad member is Pat St-Onge from New Brunswick in Canada. We’re so glad to have Pat on the team, as QM has lots and lots of Canadian readers. You can see Pat’s blog here.

Pat St-Onge

I was so excited when I got the first glimpse of Pat’s Spinout because I knew you would love it. We all have Christmas fabrics and excess reds and greens we bought when the Spirit of the Season moved us. Pat has given us the perfect way to use them up, even the littlest bits. Pat shares her thoughts:

“I was really excited about this particular project, because I just love paper piecing! My only problem was deciding which scrappy theme I would choose. I decided I needed to use scraps that stood out as a definite color such as ‘’predominantly red’’ or ‘’predominantly blue,’’ as I knew there had to be contrast between each pinwheel. I almost went with black/white/red/yellow.

“But then I thought, ‘What a nice throw to hang on the railing as a Christmas decoration!’ When I opened up my scrap bin of Christmas fabrics, I was like a kid in a candy store. So I chose golds, greens and reds with a cream background. My opinion on scrap quilting: The more the merrier!

Pat's fabric "key"

“It was really fun that even my smallest scraps could be used in one paper pieced triangle! No fabric waste there! The trick was to keep track of all the paper pieced triangles, so I made a copy of the pattern so I could write on it, and crossed out the colors used in the pattern and replaced them with my own colors.

“Then I marked the colors directly on the paper pieces so I would not get all mixed up. I made the quilt exactly the same size as the pattern, so all I had to do was switch colors, and store the finished triangles in piles.

“Arranging them on a design wall was easy. I brought the finished quilt to my local guild meeting on Tuesday for Show and Tell and everybody loved it. The girls complimented me on a job well done.”

Pat's finished Spinout

This quilt is scrappy at its best! What I love is that there is some transparency going on. Doesn’t it look like some of the Spinners are see-through? This quilt is one you could stand and admire for a long while. Pat did a great job of using fabric in similar enough values for each Spinner, but kept it interesting by varying the scale and the shade.

Even the background is interesting! The fabrics range from white to cream to tan; they play together quite nicely as if the background is lit up.

Pat’s fabric “key” above is a great idea. You’ll want to do the same thing if you use colors different from the original Spinout.

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Still three more Scrap Squad quilts to be revealed in the days to come! Stay tuned, won’t you?

Find background info on Spinout in this post.

Read more about the Scrap Squad.

Visit the Scrap Squad Group at quiltersclubofamerica.com.

Enjoy another Spinout reveal here.