Scrappy Trip Around the World

I managed to take a simple pattern, and make it much more complicated than it needed to be!

That might have been justifiable, if I was simply trying to make a quilt without buying a pattern.  However, this pattern has been around long enough, and made by enough quilters and bloggers, that there are many (MANY) free tutorials out there.

I really have no one to blame for this but myself.

But… I took a ton of photos, and I’m not going to let them go to waste.  This tutorial will walk you first through my way (with LOTS of photos) and then a quicker version of the tutorial of the way the pattern was originally written.

To make the Scrappy Trip Around the World block, start with 6 strips, 2½ inches by 15½ inches.  I made sure all of my sets of scraps included white, and I always placed that strip on one end.

Sew the 6 into pairs, and then the pairs into a strip set.

Up to this point, I’m still on track with the original pattern, but this is where I left the original pattern behind.

Subcut 6 2½ inch units.

Leave unit 1 in place, and slide unit 2 down one square.

Cut open the bottommost seam

and place the unit back, so that the white square is one square down from the white square in unit 1, and place the single square into the empty space above the unit.

Slide unit 3 down 2 squares, so that the white squares continue to line up along the diagonal.

Cut open the seam the separates the squares that are second and third from the bottom.  Place the 2 squares into the opening above the remainder of unit 3.

Continue to slide each subsequent unit one square further down than the last, cutting the seam open, and replacing the squares.

Sew the units back together, each seam in my example will sew the black piece to the white piece, and replace in the correct order, making a cascade of while down the diagonal from left to right.

Sew the units into pairs, and the 3 pairs into a Scrappy Trip Around the World block.

The original pattern has you take the strip set from way back at the beginning when you sewed 6 strips together, and fold the set in half, sewing the black strip to the white strip along the remaining free edges, creating a loop.

Then subcut into 6 2½ inch pieces, that are each a little loop.

Cut open each of the 6 loops by cutting apart a different seam.  This will give you 6 units, that can be placed in order so that each fabric drops one step along the diagonal, from left to right, just like before.

I found this step difficult to remember which seam I’d already cut, and for that reason, I like my (slightly more complicated) way of doing it better.  To each his own, right?  It’s the same block either way, just a slightly different way of getting there.

The finished block size is 12 inches, repeat as many times as needed for the number of blocks needed for your quilt, and add necessary borders if desired.

This quilt was part of the 100 Days of Quilting I participated in back in the spring.  I had hoped to finish it was part of that project.  I got as far as the quilt top completed on the 100^th day.  And then summer hit.  And it was far too hot to quilt.  I’ve also gotten into the bad habit of finishing quilt tops, and then not putting the pieces together to finish the quilt.  That’s not like me at all.  So this quilt sat, ready for quilting, for a couple of months.  And then it sat, in the ready for binding pile for another couple of months.  Because if it’s too hot to quilt, it’s certainly too hot to sit with a flannel backed quilt on your lap to get the hand binding done.

Check out that checkerboard border!  You’ll see it again soon (and improved!) in a quilt pattern I’m currently writing to sell.

Another finished quilt photo, that shows there is some blue sky in Seattle!