Scrappy Dresden

This is a picture of my latest creation called "Scrappy Dresden".  This quilt had a long journey to get to this point.  The large Dresden plates were created first about four years ago. They lay dormant until last year when I took two the five that I had made and made pillows from them.  Then I was left with three.  Then I decided that I really wanted to make a scrappy Dresden plate quilt.  My dilemma was that I only had three plates so I had to make more.  Another dilemma was that after I made the new plates, I realized that they were smaller than the original three.  I did not freak out and I had to make it work somehow. I forged on and completed the quilt.  Made the scrappy border and the two color binding.  The back is also pieced out of scraps.  This is a great quilt to make a dent in your stash and use up those fabrics that you just can not work into other quilts.  This would be the perfect quilt.

 As I was appliqueing the plates using the classic zigzag stitch, my machine began to act out and the tension was off and the zigzag started to pull and show the bobbin thread on top.  I got frustrated and did some hand applique then I did a straight stitch around three of them. Of course, I knew this was not going to work because I still had raw edges that were not covered.  In the end, I had to go back, once I had it sandwiched, and zigzagged around those three that I had straight stitched and the one that I had hand stitched.  Needless to say, I had a lot of technical issues with this quilt.

As you can see, the bobbin thread is a teal colored polyester thread which I loved.  The top is quilted with a transitional polyester thread that has four colors - red, green, blue, and yellow.  The white space around the plates is quilted with a white polyester thread.  (I will use cotton or polyester for quilting.  Polyester is stronger and has a great shine and cotton is matte.) You can see the straight line quilting which covers the entire quilt (my free motion sucks!) You can also see the zigzags too because I did that quilting after it was sandwiched.  I am not worried about that because I think that it gives the quilt personality.  I am not a "show quilter" so it is okay if I have some imperfections as long as my quilting techniques are sound and the quilt is well made.

This is a another shot of the back of the quilt showing the quilting and the pieced back.  The back has about five different fabrics that I pieced together.  Since this quilt is totally scrappy, I did not worry about coordinating fabrics.  I used scraps that I wanted to get rid of and they worked perfectly in this quilt. I am proud of ScrappyD and I hope that you have enjoyed it.