Gleaned Quilt Top, a 2.5″ scrap quilt

Some stories weave their way into our hearts, never to leave.  The account of Ruth, in the Bible, is such a story for me.  She inspires me in so many ways.  But it’s the gleaning that twists my heart.  Gleaning in a field means following the harvesters and going through the leftover grains on the ground or the plant in order to obtain food.  It’s literally searching for something of use in the leftovers of life.  How often do we find ourselves dealing with plan B, or even plan X?  Nothing about her life had gone the way she expected, and suddenly she is gleaning in the fields so she and her mother-in-law won’t starve.

There is grit in this.  I could go on and on.  Needless to say, I’ve spent countless hours pondering Ruth gleaning in the fields, and what it means to glean in my life.  So it isn’t surprising that I sketched a quilt block and named it “Gleaned”.  It’s lived in my sketchbook for a year or two, and this summer I finally made time to sew it up.  So, here she is, my Gleaned quilt top!

This Gleaned quilt top is made from scraps.  I went through years of “leftovers” to gather them.  It makes me smile to see decades old fabrics mingling with recent ones.  Some projects gifted me lots of 2.5″ scraps, such as my Arise quilt (pattern here) and Listen quilt (pattern here).

What pulls it all together are the black and white corner pieces.  I turned to Art Gallery Pure Solids for these, and used Crisp Linen and Slate.  Slate is actually a rich, dark gray that reads as a black.  The crisp linen is slightly creamy, but not too much.  Gleaned is my first project with these two colors, and I’m happy with them.  (I already know that I love working with Art Gallery pure solids, which I happily used in my Rainbow Serve Quilt and my Candy Shop Listen Quilt.)

Would you like to start a new scrap quilt?  Good news!  I’m writing the pattern now, and will release it as a free pattern to all newsletter subscribers next week.  And what’s even better?  I’m writing it for two different sized blocks.  I wasn’t ready to be done gleaning scraps, I guess, because I started another version with 1.5″ strips.

I’m off to baste my gleaned quilt top, because this is a quilt I can’t WAIT to snuggle under.  I’m tenderhearted lately, and need a little extra beauty.   Like I said, gleaning.  Always gleaning.