Following the Leader

I love using leaders and enders. I see so many benefits, and very few drawbacks. It "saves" thread (although, does it? *shrug*), it DOES help fabric not get sucked down into the stitch plate, especially when you're sewing triangles, and it's like getting a bonus project without a lot of extra work. Additionally, with the way I use leaders and enders, I get to use up scraps. It's pretty much my main scrap quilting method. I should maybe sew more scrappy quilts, but...not right now. 

Some drawbacks I can see are that I tend to feel guilty if I DON'T use an ender for some reason, and it does rather clutter up my sewing desk, because I keep my pieces all ready to go behind my machine. 

Nevertheless, I find leaders and enders exciting, even though I've been making them for many years at this point. I love when I get close to finishing and seeing what I've worked so long on come together. I love how interesting scrappy quilts are to look at. And I get excited to start a new one. The excitement has not worn off yet, haha. 

This is my fourth completed leaders and enders and this one is entirely from scraps. My others have been *mostly* scraps, but this one is completely scraps, which makes me pretty proud. I opted to use this one for another picnic blanket, so I backed it with some denim. 

I was inspired for this one by this quilt by Crazy Mom Quilts. And interestingly, she was inspired by a vintage quilt, so apparently, it's an inspiring design. She provided a tutorial, but I did not follow it. I did use the final block size, and these are TINY. But, I love that I got to use up a lot of smallish scraps, and it also gave me a good opportunity to weed out a lot of scraps that are tinier and I really should let go of. These pieces are all 1x3 finished, so they started out at 1-1/2" by 3-1/2". In my opinion, 1-1/2" is pretty small, so if something was narrower than that and not a good length, I tried to let them go. I still have pieces way to small in there, and maybe someday I'll use them to create some fabric slabs or something. We'll see. 

Anyway, another departure from her tutorial is that I chose to make them into 9 patches instead of piecing long rows. This made more sense to me, and I think it made handling a little easier. Pressing wasn't always perfect, but that's okay. I also made it a lot larger than hers. By the end, I was pretty tired of piecing little rail fences, but I think it was worth it. It's a great size for a picnic blanket. 

I did try to follow her color scheme, which was brights on the outside and low volume on the inside, and I treated this like a kitchen sink quilt--any color was okay. For the most part, I think that aspect was okay. I regret using the black solids, and the ones that are more mid-toned that don't read well enough as a light or a dark. I feel like there are far more of those than there should be and it disrupts the design that the rail fence should produce. But that's okay. I did manage to use a lot of scraps that I knew I could use somehow, these border pieces from doll panels. I used more than I think I should have, but they were the perfect width and the colors are perfect. These are just three of the different borders I used (the two horseshoe colors and the aqua arch/rainbow. The lavender strip and the red with pink and white arches strip in the photo above are also border pieces from panels; there are a lot in this quilt!).

Of course, Halloween costumes got in the way of binding it and now it's too cold to actually use it, so we'll have to wait until next summer. *sigh*

Oh, and I did the math. There are 1,728 individual scraps in this quilt. Whew! No wonder it took YEARS. It's a 72" square quilt. 

Following the Leader, quilted by Abby Latimer, completed Oct 2022