Well, there it is...my first reference to 2022. I think that's earlier than normal, lol, but today is an exciting day because I get to share a quilt I made back in the spring 😊 Scrappy Playground is one of the quilts in the 2022 Quilter's Planner, along with several other beautiful projects. Pre-sales of the Planner open on August 16th and Planners will start shipping on September 1st. I can't wait to get my hands on mine! Photo by Kitty Wilkin (@nightquilter) for Quilter' Planner 2022 On a good day, I try to cut my scraps into useable pieces as I go. I say on a good day, because a lot of times I can't be bothered and I just shove them into the appropriate scrap box and call it done. However, even though I'm not consistent at it, I still have a fair pile of squares cut in various sizes so every now and then I challenge myself to design something that will use a bunch of those squares. Scrappy Playground came from one of those self-challenges and I love it so much! I named it Scrappy Playground because the square 'rings' of scrappy squares reminded me of playground equipment for some reason. It's also an appropriate name because scraps can be a quilter's playground, where we get to play with our beloved bits from previous projects. I set myself very few rules when it came to which fabrics I would use for the scrappy squares. Since the background is solid grey, I didn't use any greys that might blend in with that. There are a few grey squares, but they're either much lighter or much darker and they have prints on them. When stitching the squares together, I didn't repeat fabrics in any one section and I tried to choose fabrics that looked nice next to each other, without getting too worried about that. Other than that, my motto was, anything goes! Photo by Kitty Wilkin (@nightquilter) for Quilter' Planner 2022 There are fabrics from projects made in the last couple of months and fabrics from when I first started quilting over 20 years ago. There are batiks, animal skin prints, solids, florals, geometric prints, novelty prints, holiday prints and prints with metallic highlights...You name it, it's probably in there somewhere. When paired with the solid grey background, they all play together very nicely. The deadline to have the quilt finished to send to Kitty for the photography for the Planner was a tight turnaround, but the quilt top came together quickly since I already had all of the squares cut. Well, almost all. I did cut a few in colours I felt were underrepresented and I added a few recent favourite fabrics while I was at it. If you're not trying to meet a deadline, though, this would make a great leaders/enders project, allowing you to grow your Scrappy Playground quilt while you're working on other projects. I thought a lot about how to quilt this one while I pieced the top. I kept coming back to the idea of double loops, which made me think of kids running around a playground. Though I doubt anyone else will ever get the connection between the design, the name and the quilting, I quite like how it all fits together in my own head. I also like how the loopy quilting adds movement and curves to the straight lines of the piecing. Of course, with all those scrappy bits, the binding had to be scrappy, too! In my haste to get the quilt in the mail to Kitty, I hardly took any pictures, but you can see the scrappy binding in Kitty's gorgeous pictures up above. I love a good, scrappy binding! Pre-sales for the Planner open on Monday, the 16th, and you can customize your Planner so it's perfect for the way you want to use it. I would be lost if I didn't use a planner and I love how beautiful and functional the Quilter's Planner is 😊