scrappy

Scrappy Quilt Bracelets

You may remember my scrappy fabric tags I made a couple of years ago. I loved that idea.

I have been working on expanding on that idea by turning scrap cutter quilts into wearable art…more specifically I wanted to see if I couldn’t turn these scraps into bracelets.

I’m a little embarrassed to say that each step took a little bit of refining until I was able to get a consistent result with each one that I tried. I almost threw in the towel a few times, but the time wasted and each failed attempt just made me even more determined to make it work.

My first fail was cutting the strip for the bracelet. I didn’t take into account the quilting stitches on the quilt. Quilting stitches hold a top, middle and bottom layer together. When I cut a small strip, it basically peeled apart in large areas. Stitching on vintage quilts is also unreliable. There were areas where the seams came apart. AARGH!

My fix for those problems was to top stitch over the surface of a scrap of quilt. I emptied a spool of thread while meandering in a scribble design.

I was then able to cut my bracelet strips without them falling apart.

The next step was getting the words onto the strip. I decided to use my character stitches on my sewing machine. That worked the first couple of times and then…AARGH! Old quilts can be kinda lumpy and my machine didn’t want to stitch the tiny letters over the lumps. I finally tried stitching the words on muslin. Eureka!

I then stitched the the muslin to the strip in my favorite shabby way.

If you want to try this and you don’t have character stitches on your machine I also tried it with stamps as an alternative.

I embellished around the words with little pearl beads.

The next failure was the buttonhole. Yep, for the same reason the character stitches didn’t want to stitch…those !@#$% lumps. AARGH!

Deep breath. I was not going to let this project beat me!

Light bulb! I finally had good luck with a button/loop closure. Elastic cord formed the loop.

With the bracelet strip placed on canvas fabric and the knot of the loop inserted under one end, I stitched around the edges of the bracelet a couple of times. Just like the shabby tags, I didn’t stitch perfect lines.

After stitching the canvas backing to the bracelet I trimmed the excess away and added a button to complete the closure function.

And then like eating potato chips, I couldn’t stop at just one.

Enjoy!