Hello all, Mary Ellen here.

Not all quilters enjoy scrap quilting. There is something way too random for the taste of many quilters when you start making a tossed salad of all sorts of fabrics. I’ve made a few scrappy quilts that push the envelope a bit too much even for me. (The dog loves them though; he’s lying on one of them in that photo.) Thus comes the concept of “planned scrappy”. By adding just a bit of structure to the scrappy theme, more quilters can become comfortable with some scrappiness in their quilts. After all, if you are a lover of Kim Diehl fabrics, for example, you probably have quite a few scraps from her lines. They all go together, don’t they? Or perhaps you have blue in every quilt you make. A 2 color quilt with a variety of blue scraps paired with a variety of creams could be lovely.

Our national teacher for seminar this fall, Bonnie Hunter, is a self-described scrapaholic. This morning while checking out the Quiltmaker magazine blog (Bonnie writes a column for each issue called “Addicted to Scraps”.) I ran across this video (here it is). Although Bonnie isn’t the narrator, it is based on a block Bonnie designed for a special issue of blocks which Quiltmaker publishes each year. In the video some good hints for choosing scraps for a block or quilt are given. See what you think. I’m again throwing out a challenge that we make lots of scrappy quilts to share with Bonnie this fall, even if they’re not from her patterns. How about it?