Sewing with Scraps - A Fail - Deconstructing to Reconstruct

Last year some time, I found a great little quilting kit in the charity shop. It was for making projects with one inch square pieces. I figured it would be a great size to use up lots of small fabric scraps I had in my scrap basket.

I almost immediately set to using up my fabric scraps to make inch square pieces that I then made into small cross blocks and I then started to sew them together. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to use this patchwork for or what it would end up being. 

Here's a picture of how it progressed:

The problem was, I wasn't very happy with it, for several reasons, so I put it aside and gave up on it. I came across it again the other day and had a serious think about it. I didn't want to continue with it the way that it was. The main reasons being that my stitching was sloppy and I'd made my stitches way too big. I'd also made the mistake of using only white cotton to sew all the pieces together, regardless of the colour of fabric and on some of the darker fabrics, the stitches were very noticable and just stood out way too much . 

A second mistake I made, was using any old fabric that I had to hand, in my enthusiasm to use up my scraps. Some of the larger prints just didn't really lend themselves well to being made into such small patchwork pieces and in addition, some of the different styles of the prints didn't seem to blend well together.  As a consequence the outcome just didn't look the way I had hoped. I just didn't really like it.

I decided that I could do one of three things: carry on regardless of my doubts and complete a make that I didn't like and which I knew would irritate me; throw the whole thing away which seemed too much of a waste; or deconstruct it and start again using only the fabrics that I thought suited the project well. I decided to do the latter.

It took a few hours to unpick all of the blocks. I set aside the ones I wanted to keep and then I deconstructed them further back into 1" squares, so that I can sew them back together using matching coloured thread. I have no excuse not to do this, as I have a basket full of cotton reels of all colours. I think I was just being lazy using white cotton unilaterally.

I'm now looking forward to re-making it, whilst trying to make my stitches a lot smaller and less noticeable. I'm sticking with very ditsy floral or spot prints for the theme going forward, as I think it's important to consider scale and size of the fabric print used when making tiny patchwork pieces.  It's definitely been a learning curve, but hopefully I'm now on the right track.

I'll let you know how it progresses.