String quilts and projects yearning to be finished!

Well, at the end of my class on Saturday one of the instructors who had been very patient in helping me all afternoon called out from the cutting table "Hurry up and finish that pinning! I want to show you this string quilt!" Imagine this spoken like a scold, but followed by a hearty laugh. So I hurriedly pinned the fabric, only sticking myself once or twice, and came on over.

On the table were the remnants of the binding of many quilts of all colors. Once you are done binding a quilt, you invariably have a 2.5 in wide length of binding cloth left. No good quilter wants to waste such a commodity. Any scrap, big or small, is of value. It takes as much work to cut that scrap as it took to cut the piece you were wanting at the time, if you follow me, so we all keep bags and stacks of oddly shaped fabric just waiting for a quilt that needs a piece just that size and color.

So then Margaret introduced me to String Quilts. You take the strips and sew them onto a square of fabric using a method that makes the sewing simple--straight lines. You also must faithfully iron as you go so as to keep the strips smooth and straight. You cut off the excess with a rotary cutter, and you are then left with a thick (double layered) block with diagonal stripes going across it. It is a great way to use leftover strips of any size (or course, the leftovers of this process are little triangles, so the next quilt will have to involve fox and geese, I think).

Then you can do whatever you want with the blocks...long diagonal stripes across the quilt, diamond patterns, arrows, whatever you like. You can coordinate your colors or make it totally scrappy. It is actually very fun and can be a project you work on slowly as you have scraps or purposefully as the focus of your quilting.

So Margaret got me started on a sample block. It was red and white. She chatted to me about all the possibilities, showing me various scraps she had that I could take. And well, I had already done one block in red and white, so I was basically started. I began collecting up colors and blocks and my mind was already working. As I drove home from the class I was already lamenting the neglected projects waiting at home on my shelf. Ahh, tabled again due to the heady passion of falling in love with new fabric and patterns...

So for the last three days I have been faithfully matching colors and sewing strips. Many from those given by Margaret and many from my stores of scraps at home. Reds and Blues and Browns and Whites and Creams. I had used all these colors in many of my favorite quilts, so I really enjoyed the chance to work with them again.

Once I had about 14 blocks, I began thinking about how I would put them together. I laid them all out, turning the blocks like I was working a giant kaleidoscope with the colored lines moving in their geometrical way. AND THEN IT HIT ME....