New Quilt: Railroad Tracks

After I finished by Garlic Knots quilt top, I started debating on what I was going to sew next. I want to finish some UFOs but I also want to work on reducing my strip buckets. Right now they are so full that they are over flowing. I didn’t want to pick a quilt that involved a lot of prep work. I wanted a quilt that I thought was attractive and a quilt that would come together quickly AND use up strips from my scrap bucket.

I paged through several of the quilt books that I’ve collecting for this very purpose and settled on this book, Start with Strips from Susan Ache.

The quilt I picked is Train Tracks. It’s a simple quilt…nothing fancy about it but still, I really liked it.

Here is a bigger picture…

The quilt is designed to be 75″ x 90″. I’d like to make it a little wider. I think I’ll add one more block to each row bringing it to 83 1/2″ x 90″.

The next day I had Carver and Gannon here so I was up early and immediately started sewing on the quilt. I could as there really was no cutting to the quilt if I already had cut strips…and I did.

I ended up bringing the bucket of 2 1/2″ strips downstairs and did some sorting. I decided this is going to make with dark and reproduction prints. For the white area, I’ll use muslin.

I dumped the whole bucket out on the table and decided to give it a good sorting.

I pulled all of the pieces that weren’t the full width of fabric. I thought this quilt would be a great way to use them up.

I sorted out all of the prints that accidentaly got into the box. See that green piece. That should be in my 2 1/2″ strip bucket of bright colors.

This is what I ended up with…there were piles to
1-pass on
2-go in the bright colored bucket
3-go in the 2″ bucket
4-go in the crumb bucket
5-sew up for the quilt
and a newly organized 2 1/2″ scrap bucket. The colored strips are on one end and the neutrals on the other end. I’m so excited to have this together.

These are the pieces that will get used up in the quilt first. All of these are short cuts being anywhere from 5″ long to 25″ long. If I get these all used up and need more, I will dive into the “width of fabric strips” that I saved back and put back into the bucket. As is, this is now manageable. YAHOO!!

Here is by bucket after the cleaning and sorting. You can see the neutral strips on the right, the colored on the left. In between is two bags of 2 /2″ squares.

After I got that sorted I ironed the pieces that I had sewn that morning. I’m improvising the instructions because I want to use up all of the smallest lengths that were in the scrap bucket.

I used the method I outlined in THIS VIDEO to cut my segments.

I had found some strips in the bucket that were already sewn together in sets of three. I had sewn these together when I was making a different quilt. I’ll incorporate them into this quilt. It’s great to have a chance to use them up.

Here are my cut units. So, with that, it looks like this quilt is a GO!

Being I cleaned out the Garlic Knots leftovers I had this open box to organize my project. I’m so excited to be starting this.

If you are interested, HERE is a link to the book.