Tiny Tumblers

My friend Nancy is the expert at the tumbler quilts.  She takes the smallest scraps that most people would just throw away and lays them out into eye pleasing designs.  She calls them A-B patterns.  She taught Kindergarten for a very long time and now teaches special ed.  These quilts are made with 17x17 blocks or 289 little scraps of fabric.  It's the ultimate recycling project.  These little quilts take a long time to sew together and yet she has the patience to make dozens of them.  She's also really good at the bigger ones, but I think these little ones give her a special kind of pleasure.

All quilters are a little on the crazy size-taking perfectly good fabric, cutting it up and sewing it back together again, but when you can take fabric that is destined for the landfill and turn it into something useful, it brings you back to the roots of quilting.  After all, isn't that the original purpose of a quilt?  To take something like old clothes that were worn out and cut out the parts that were still useable.  A piece from Dad's old jacket and mom's old dress and then sew those small pieces together to make a warm cover for the bed.  Now we just throw those useless things away and run to WalMart to get whatever new things we need.