A quilt of future past

For a long time I have dreamt of making a beautiful quilt as a bedspread for my bed. I think it started when I got one of my first books about sewing and half of it was about making quilts. At first I thought it would be simple to make a quilt. It couldn't be much harder than seeing what fabric you have at home, cut them up and make a quilt. Right? Then I started to understand that you need a lot of fabric to make a quilt, and if you want to make a full bedspread, well that's going to be a lot of squares to measure and cut.  Also it felt wrong to buy fabric in order to just cut it up for a quilt, when to me a quilt is something you make to reuse or at least repurpose old fabric. Then of course it would involve a lot of thinking about what colours and patterns to combine into the quilt. The laziness in me made it clear that I would probably never make a quilt.

Then last spring I came up with an idea. What if I cut out a piece of fabric from every sewing project I make and save them to make a quilt one day. This would mean that I wouldn't be buying fabric just for the quilt. I wouldn't have to plan the colours and patterns in advance, it would simply be a matter of what I end up with. I am also curious if I have a preference to work with certain colours and if there will be a dominating colour in the quilt.  I also really like the idea that by making a quilt out of scraps from my costume projects it will be a very personal quilt with a special story. Today when I took out the squares that I have made I definitely feel nostalgic about some of them.

These are my squares so far. I try to get two squares out of every fabric, but sometimes more if I really like the fabric, and sometimes I only get one square. I also don't cut squares from linen and cotton that I use for underwear or linings. I still have a long way to go before I can make a big bedspread quilt, but it gives me a bit of satisfaction every time I add a new square to the pile.

As for the size of the squares, it's quite random. I made a square from paper that just fit the first fabric that I cut, and then I use that square as a pattern for all the other pieces. I haven't even measured the size of them.