Recycled Scarves

This being "Earth Day" makes it most appropriate to post about this project that my friend, Alicia, and I have worked on this past week during her annual visit from Milwaukee. We designed and created cuddle quilts as Christmas presents for three of our mutual friends from silk scarves she had inherited from close friends. Two of the recipients are daughters of one of them while the other one was friends of both owners of the scarves. Here's the back and front of our first creation ...

 These are the scarves we selected for the one above and our method for designing the quilts ... just folding and laying out the chosen scarves on the floor.

After we had an idea of what we were going to do, I had taken photos of the three scarf quilt layouts which we took shopping to find other fabrics to fill in borders and for quilt backings. The general size for all of them is 60" square ... or a bit less.

Here's our second silk scarf cuddle quilt ...

The center blue square is a whole scarf. The four large flowers in the corner blocks were cut from a long rectangular one that had six of them. The borders with the squares are from Thai silk curtains and the violet satin border was someone's excess upholstery fabric ... both had been passed onto Alicia. The lighting for the picture I took of the back side really distorted the actual hues ... especially the border which is a deep red cotton with tiny black dots while the center square is deep blue and violet cotton batik.

And here's our third one in the "layout" stage ...

I've already pieced the top and backing and it's in the process of being pinned for me to machine quilt*. I've done most of the cutting and machine work while Alicia has starched and ironed (the secret to working with slippery, sliding fabric) and hand-stitched the bindings.

The first quilt from silk scarves is this one I made for Alicia as a Christmas present several years ago. The story about it is here.

*Go to this link to see the 3rd silk scarf quilt almost finished.