I had a bunch of flannel scraps left over from 2 quilts I had made for my son and my husband. The quilts were fun—very scrappy with many “manly” plaids in primary colors, but now what to do with all the leftovers? I was tired of all those plaids, so a third quilt had to be fast, easy, and most of all, it had be made with just the leftovers I had—no buying of fabric for this quilt. Without much idea of where I was going with this, I  sewed together a bunch of blocks. When I arranged them, I didn’t like the blocks right next to each other so I added navy blue sashing and border to separate all the busyness of the plaids. (Okay, I admit it, I did have to buy a little fabric for the sashing and border.) When I finished the quilt,  it needed something more. I added some buttons, but it still needed something so I decided to use red perle cotton to do big stitches down the center of the sashing and around the border.

I am not great at keeping my lines straight or my 1/4″ long stitches even, but that is where our Inchie Ruler Tape came to my rescue. I just stuck the tape down the center of the sashing and stitched away, using the evenly spaced marks along the edge of the tape as my guide so I could sew evenly and straight.

It worked great and made the job much quicker. I am happy with the results, and I even like this “leftovers” quilt better than the first two I made.

Just a word of caution about stitching with perle cotton through flannel—it is nearly impossible to sew through 2 layers of flannel and batting with such heavy thread. I had already machine quilted around the blocks so I used the big stitches as embellishment. I sewed the perle cotton only through the top layer of flannel and caught the batting. It looks good and was not nearly as hard as trying to actually quilt all the way through the layers.