Making a Crazy Quilt Square-Part 1

Because I received several questions about how my Grandmother made her crazy quilt squares that I posted about last week, I decided to share with you the process. I was planning to use cotton fabric scraps; however, this week a cousin gave me two bags of men’s ties, and I decided to use them for this project. As I am posting in real time, I have no idea what the outcome will be, but you can follow along with me to see how it turns out!

Before I start on how to make a crazy quilt square, I will show you the back of one of Grandmother’s squares per a reader’s request. As you can see, the velvet pieces are sewn onto a scrap piece of fabric. Although this square was sewn onto a plain white piece of fabric, quite a few of her squares were sewn onto squares cut from floral bedsheets, but because of the thickness of the velvet, you can’t see it from the front.

Now, on to my current project.

First of all, I washed the ties. Yes, I know that most of them are 100% silk or a silk blend, but I decided to take a risk to see how it turned out. I sorted them by color and washed them on a quick wash cycle in my machine. Of course, I wouldn’t attempt this with a machine that has an agitator located in the machine tub—or even a front loading machine that might make them too tangled. Washing by hand is probably the better option! I found conflicting information online as to whether vinegar helps silk become more colorfast, but I decided to pour some into the wash water just in case it would help. I didn’t have any disasters with color bleeding, thankfully.

A picture of the ties in the bottom of the washing machine—reminds me of a piece of modern art. :-)

When the wash cycle was complete, I hung them up to air dry.

As you can see, washing the ties did distort the shape on a few of the ties, but for my purposes, it doesn’t matter.

As I mentioned above, to make a crazy quilt out of scraps, it works best to sew the top pieces onto another piece of scrap fabric. Decide how large you want the finished blocks to be and cut the bottom squares of fabric that size plus seam allowance or a little larger so that you can have some flexibility to square the blocks later. In this case, I am planning to make a pillow cover so I cut my square 20” x 20” and I plan to make the pillow cover 18” x 18”. The fabric I am using below is a scrap of muslin that I had on hand. But as I said before old bedsheets work great for this type of project; however, make sure that the weave isn’t too tight to hand stitch.

Next, I selected five coordinating ties. (Now, as you can see in the pictures of Grandmother’s crazy quilt squares, crazy quilts are often made with a variety of colors—not necessarily coordinating, which gives the finished project eye-catching color). But I am going with coordinating colors for this particular pillow. I might be a bit more adventurous on the next project. Notice that I chose a somewhat solid-color tie, two florals and two geometric patterns to give the finished product some interesting visual appeal.

At first, I thought that I would leave the ties intact and stitch them to the fabric side-by-side; however, I decided to disassemble the ties to see how much more fabric it would provide, and so that I could overlap the fabric and stitch proper seams. The interfacing in the ties would have made the seams too bulky to use that method otherwise.

And, disassembling and trimming and pressing three ties is as far as I got yesterday…I didn’t even get pictures of the trimmed pieces, but I will show those to you next time…have a great weekend!

For part two, click here: Making a Crazy Quilt Square, Part 2.