Sew-off squares to the rescue

Longtime readers of my blog know that I am enamored of sew-off squares, those little bits of fabric that you sew onto at the end of a seam to make sure your needle doesn't come unthreaded.  For me, they're both an essential sewing technique and an opportunity for small-time creativity.

Depending on what fabrics I'm working with and what color thread is on my machine, the squares end up with quite different characters. I produce these things by the dozen as I do complicated piecing and quilting (practically every seam needs to be sewed off) and stash them in plastic bags. When I needed to make two small pieces for a sale to benefit our local visual art association, I pulled out my bags.

My two pieces used quite different approaches.  For the first one I gathered squares that had been heavily stitched, so densely that they almost became monochromes, obscuring much of the underlying fabric.  I thought they looked rather painterly, especially when placed close together.

For the second piece I chose squares that were not so heavily stitched, and found nine made out of related fabrics (leftovers from two huge striped quilts made two years ago) to arrange into a nine-patch composition.  I sewed them to a linen backing and mounted that to the canvas.

The gimmick of the sale is that all the works were the same size (8" square) and were hung anonymously; people only found out who did their art after they bought it.  I checked out the sale a half hour after the doors opened and was very pleased to see that one of my pieces had already sold; not sure what happened with the other one.