Strings

Well, I finally have my first quilt finish for the 100 Day Project/AKA 100 Days of Scraps. Meet Strings, a quilt whose front is made entirely of scrappy strings and other bits from the scrap basket.

Folks have asked, and no, I didn't use a fabric foundation. I just sewed a bunch of strips together, and then added corners. Or sometimes, I actually started with a corner, and added strings from there. I didn't worry too much about the size of each block. I just let the strings I chose to use together determine that.

What that means, is that sometimes I didn't gauge well, and bits I actually liked got trimmed off. Oh well.

Eventually, I had enough blocks to make a good-sized quilt (54" x 55"). You can see that there were places I had to add in pieced strips or much smaller blocks that I made specifically to fill a certain space.

I continued on to make a scrappy quilt back, though I did have to pull a few fabrics from stash to make blocks large enough. Other than that gray solid, all the fabrics I pulled were in pretty short supply, so it felt just fine using them up here.

I think I mentioned that I had a cold that really hung on, and by the time I was feeling up to quilting, I was also in the mood to get this one done. So I chose to quilt using a diagonal serpentine stitch about 1.5" part. I marked every 3" with my hera marker and quilted those lines, then quilted between them all again by eye. I confess that quilting in that way was relaxing but quick - ie. barely over an hour. This time, for this quilt, it felt just fine.

The thread I used was an Aurifil 50wt variegated 4570 [Silver Fox]. I thought it suited this mostly gray quilt very nicely.

I had just enough of a gray print to make a binding, which I hand-finished. So even though I did end up using a few stash pulls for this quilt, the front is 100% scraps, and what I pulled was 95% used up in the back and binding, so that felt good. All in all, I'm happy with the finish, and plan to donate Strings to our guild's giving committee.