Ellen Lindner: Art & Creativity

My local quilt shop does something that I love.  Well, many things, really.  But one in particular.  When trimming fabrics to create fat quarters, they save all the little skinny trimmings and bag them up.  When the bag is eventually full, they sell it.  I love these, and have used them in several projects.  Like this quilt, and this knitted project.

Recently, I”ve noticed a lot of textured pillows in home dec stores.  Like this one from Target.

Which got me thinking about my bag of strips.  Not that I wanted to make a pillow.  But, I liked the idea of sewing strips down in lines.  Maybe not straight ones, though.

Knowing that the background fabric would show through, I selected an appropriate one, added batting, and drew on a few reference lines.  I anticipated sewing the strips on in random order.  But, I quickly abandoned that idea because it created too much of a striped effect.  Instead, I started like this.  Click image for a larger view.

As you can see in the photo below, this spiral is both very textured and very hairy!  Many of the fabric strips were creased, having been cut away from the fabric fold.  In these cases, I generally stitched down the center, encouraging the fabric edges to flair up.  (I say “down the center” but I found that steering was pretty challenging with all these little wonky pieces.  So, it’s all pretty messy – which doesn’t bother me.)

My only plans for this – currently – are to have fun with it.  I don’t know what it will become, but it’s a nice little project to work on when watching a favorite TV program, etc.  So far, I’m happy with the hairy results.

Ellen Lindner