Quick Charity Quilts Series--Scrappy Trips

In our continuing series on quick charity quilts, I thought I would choose a design and see how long it took me to finish a top.

You've likely seen the Scrappy Trip Along making the rounds on the interwebs; that's the design I decided on. (You can find the tutorial here and the Flickr group here.)

I wanted to start with a bright and happy palette without getting too frenetic, so limited my choices to two colors: yellow and pink. Varying the tone of each gave the quilt some sparkle.

As I began creating strip sets, I placed each strip deliberately, choosing which other fabric strips to place around it. It soon became clear that placing the colors in such a manner would take a lot of time, so I made piles of strips and grabbed randomly, only putting them back when I had already used that particular print in the strip set.

The strip sets went together quickly after that.

Unsewing each sliced strip set took longer than I expected, but the pretty 12" blocks were worth it.

Cutting the fabric took approximately an hour. Assembling the blocks took another 12.5.

I forgot to keep track of how long it took to sew all the block together to create the top.

The entire process took a week, sewing after work and on the weekend.

Honestly, it wasn't as quick as I had thought it would be. BUT if you increase the strip size, you could make it much faster!

VARIATIONS

• Strips cut at 4 1/4" will make a simple, generously-sized baby quilt with just 4 blocks (45" square finished, each block 23" unfinished).
• Strips cut at 3 1/2" will make a row 6 feet wide with only 4 blocks (18 1/2" each unfinished) - choose your finished quilt size by adding rows below.
• Increase the strip size to 6 1/2", and in just 2 blocks (36 1/2" each unfinished), your row will be 6 feet wide.

All in all, it took a little longer than I expected, but is still a relatively fast quilt to make for charity, especially if you alter the strip size.