Crazy Crumb Quilt Blocks in the Making

I posted the other day that I wanted to start making crumb quilt blocks, and so it begins!  I grabbed my stash of bits and pieces of remnants from various earlier projects and starting sewing them together in a random fashion.   It doesn't matter if the piece you start with is already fairly big, because once you sew it to another piece, you can trim that and make two (or more) pieces from it.  Then you piece those together with others, and just keeping adding and trimming until you have something large enough to square up into a block the size that you want.

I'm trying to put some pieces in a wonky direction just for a bit of interest, but I haven't done as much of that as I'd like, so will work on that more.  I need more fabric scraps with a variety of colors and patterns before I can go much further.  Here are a few examples of blocks I'm working on now.

You're supposed to do this completely random, but I had small pieces with a whole owl showing, and I couldn't not use them intact.  I figure they will be add a bit of whimsy to my finished piece.  Don't judge.  :)

I have no idea what my blocks will eventually be fashioned into, but I don't have to worry about that just yet.  It will take me time to build up enough of a stash to make the blocks random and not matchy-matchy, so I'll probably work on my crumb quilt blocks in between other projects.   Because of all the seams, I'll have to put a sashing border around them if I want to use them in a rag quilt, so I'm not sure if that will be my goal or not.  For now, I will just continue to build on them until I have enough to decide what size blocks I want to trim them into.

If you want to learn how to make crazy blocks like this, check out Darlene's crumb quilt block tutorials on youtube.  She has a whole series of various ways to make them.  (Word of caution:  she does throw in a word or two here and there that aren't fit for little ears, but very few, maybe 4-5 words in 10 videos.  The tutorials are worth it, IMO).

Someday I'll figure out how to do my own videos, but I will try to show as much as I can in photos here on the blog.  I'll do another post soon showing how you can take larger scraps and turn them into crumby pieces by stitching to other pieces then cutting.

~ Marie Anne

P.S.  This is one of the cutting mat and ruler sets that I have, and I love it!  Unfortunately, I have no idea where my mats and dquilting rulers are since moving.  I guess I should make finding them a priority.