Sunday, January 11, 2009

String quilts

I was inspired by Bonnie of Quiltville to make a string quilt. I started with a pile of scraps from the Newborns in Need group. I tried just working from the scraps randomly but soon realized I needed to do some sorting. I sorted the fabrics into 3 groups - pastels, brights and non-baby. The non-baby fabrics just were not working out very well in the few strippy blocks I sewed.

One of the items in our donated box was some cream colored sheets. I used the sheet like muslin for the base of the blocks. I cut the sheet into 5 inch squares which is larger than what I wanted but that gave me some room to square it back up if it got wonky after sewing on strips.

This was an interesting project but the small sized squares did seem to make this go on forever. It also is a problem that I my iron is across the room from my sewing machine, so I would sew a strips on a few blocks and then go press. I think to be able to do a lot of this you need to have a location where you can spread out your fabrics, have your sewing machine and your iron right there.

In the end I made 2 baby quilts - one pastel and one brights. You can see I did sneak in some dark fabrics into both. Some fabrics ended up in both quilts as they could be considered pastel or bright depending on my mood.

This is the one with bright colors (and some dark colors)




The back has little sailboats on it.


This is the pastel one. The border is just white with small pink dots.

The back is a soft flannel with duckies.


Now that I've gotten it out of my system about making a string quilt, I'm going to pass the remaining scraps along to someone else in the group to see what they can do. I will probably do one again in the future but I will think twice before doing such small blocks. Visit Quiltville to learn all the ends and outs of using scraps to make quilts. Bonnie has some wonderful examples on her website and blog.

2 comments:

Bonnie K. Hunter said...

Hi! Thanks for sending the link to your blog. The string quilts turned out SO nice. And I love that 5" size..it's my fave too..not too big,not too small..just right!

Bonnie

Anonymous said...

I am at the point of sorting stash right now.............don't think I'll ever finish. I can't wait to make a string quilt!