Raw Edge Mosaic Tile Quilt

For a while I've been blog and google surfing looking at postage stamp quilts, coin quilts and raw edge quilts.  A few weeks ago I decided I was going to come up with my own plan to incorporate all the ideas into one quilt.  I have a 12" plexiglass template that I used for the basis of each block.  I also had a bunch of white flat sheets that I wanted to use for something and tons (seriously....tons of scraps).  I started off by cutting 25 12 inch white blocks.  The I free hand cut 25 slightly larger pieces of quilt batting and 25 larger square pieces for the back.....

My next step was to sandwich together the three pieces to make one quilt block.  I pinned the block with one safety pin in the middle and twelve around the perimeter.  Before I started sewing, I went through all my small pieces and cut them at random sizes and had them stacked next to the sewing machine.  I used a ziz zag stitch and sewed approximately 1/4" in around each piece of fabric.  Sometimes I would end up with a smaller area than I had a piece of fabric for, so I would cut the fabric to fit the space and did not worry about it being straight or not.  I knew since I was doing raw edges that after washing the quilt all imperfections would disappear!

When completed I had a stack of 25 blocks that needed to be trimmed.....

I used my cutting mat, plexiglass ruler and rotary cutter to get them all trimmed up evenly....

I then arranged them all out on the living room floor to work on the position of each block...

After I got the blocks put in the order I wanted, I sewed my rows......

Layed them all out on the living room floor again to make sure I still had the rows in the right order for sewing them together.  This is when the Bichon decided he wanted in on my game....

I had to take about a twenty minute break to play with the dog, get him worn out so he would get up on the couch and take a nap so I could return to my floor arrangements....

After I got all the rows sewn together, Riley was ready to get on my quilt once again!

This quilt turned out a little more feminine than I had intended so I chose a plaid fabric for the backing.....

I also used the orange plaid for the binding.  I cut 2.5 inch lengths of fabric, sewed them together, folded in half lengthwise and pressed with the iron.  The binding was then put on the quilt by matching raw edges to raw edges and sewing on to the quilt.  I sewed the binding onto the back of the quilt first, then folded it over to the front and used a blanket stitch to secure it in place...............

The next step was to run the quilt through the washer and dryer and let all those raw edges of those hundreds of little quilt pieces do their magic..............

There were many threads to trim after taking it out of the dryer......

I thought I got most of them until I started looking at these pictures and see all the tiny ones I missed!

I think I'm going to send it through the washer and dryer again and let the edges curl up some more and do some more thread clipping....

I love the way it turned out.  It's so colorful just like I wanted and I love all the little pieces.  I can tell you a story behind almost every scrap!

I'll probably be making several more quilts using this technique.  I can't even tell that I made a dent in my scrap pile!

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