First Flimsy of 2019!

In January, shortly after I'd injured my shoulder but before I realized how serious the injury was, I'd sewn a bunch of scrap strips into rough blocks. The intention was to create a quilt for the Hands2Help quilt drive this year. 

And then I had to set everything aside to allow my shoulder to heal. 

I've not been completely inactive but I haven't been able to build a quilt top for a good six months. Lately my shoulder has been feeling almost normal again. Hurray! I figured the easiest, safest thing to do would be to get out those string blocks and piece them into columns. 

They all turned out too long in the beginning so there was some reverse sewing involved before I had a flimsy the size and shape I wanted. The most stressful part of this assembly job was tacking those long columns up on the design wall so I could judge for color and print balance. I really have to stretch to reach the top of my design wall, even without a compromised shoulder joint. Eventually I got all the columns to the same approximate length. I wanted a whole cloth border to finish it off visually and to keep all of those seam ends from coming apart when it was mounted on the long arm.

About 60" wide x 80" long

I feel like I lucked out when I found the black print in my stash. It has other colors in it but is dark enough to corral the colors and prints in the strings. Of course, getting those borders on wasn't without a hitch. I cut 2.5" wide strips and began piecing them together end-to-end for length. Then, without thinking, I went to the ironing board and started pressing them in half as if I were making a binding! Rather than undo all that work I went back to the yardage and cut new strips. There was just enough left to get all the way around the top. I doubt there's enough of the false-start binding to use when the time comes but that would be really helpful. I typically cut my binding strips only two and a quarter inches wide though, so I'll have to deal with that issue too. First up is to create a back for this top. A big ole piece of yardage would be the simplest way to go obviously. It would also be the easiest on my shoulder. I know I don't have anything like that on hand however, and there's still old yardage waiting to be used up somehow. That's a problem for another day. Right now I'm just going to bask in the glow of having finally completed another quilt top! 😁

Chasing That Striped Squirrel

Here are the results of all the strip cutting I've done this past week:

It may not look like much in that photo. Let me show you how it stacked up in front of a ruler.

That's my 6.5" square ruler standing on it's head. A little closer look...

Four inches of 2" strips! and lesser quantities of wider strips.

This is the basket I was thinking of using to keep them neat and tidy. I was pleased to be able to empty it easily - a rare occurrence, I assure you. 

Fortunately it worked perfectly!

From left to right I have three inch wide trips, then 2.5," then 3.5," and finally the two inch strips. I fully expect to have two inch strips leftover. That doesn't concern me greatly though. I have a feeling there's going to be more than one quilt out of this basket, and I have other uses for the narrowest strips.

Of course, having set up the basket I had to see how well it was going to work for me. If this is any indication I think it's going to work out just fine. 😀

I'm only sewing enough strips together to get twelve or thirteen inches of length for the time being. That gives me "blocks" and makes it easier for me to judge how far along I am toward the size of quilt top I have as my goal. I can also rearrange blocks as I see fit before sewing them together in columns. I figure seven columns for 56" in width and about 72" for the length. At least that's the plan for the time being. Plans have a way of changing, as I'm sure you know. 😉 

I'm linking up with Lori's string-along over at Humble Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

The Evolution of a Scrap Busting System

Maybe you've heard how you can't find your voice as an artist unless you make a lot of art. The same applies to quilt making. You try a lot of techniques, play with a lot of different types of prints, and - at least if you're like me - eventually settle into a style and/or rhythm that works for you. Having said that, I've discovered what I enjoy most is the challenge of taking a bunch of uncoordinated prints and making them into a pleasing composition. The more prints the merrier! 

A year or two ago I set a loose goal for myself to make a dent in the stash I'd built up over two decades. To that end I followed someone else's example and cut a bunch of prints up into strips of varying widths, from 3.5" down to 1.5." What I've learned since then is that I don't naturally gravitate to using strips in my quit making. Or at least not in the way some people do. I'll make the occasional log cabin block for example, but I get bored going around the same central patch over and over again. What I seem to enjoy the most is building blocks out of squares and triangles. Some of those strips can be cut into patches to use in blocks but I had an awful backlog of strips in my closet.

My solution for storing the strips was to clip color families together and then hang them from what was meant to hold ties or belts or something.

One thing I have discovered is that I do enjoy using 3" strips to make Scrappy Trip blocks. But you need at least 19" in length to make a 15" block so I separated those strips by length as well as width.

Two inch strips have proven to be very useful for making 12" Lego blocks and the hulls of 6" boats. Other than that I would only occasionally get into the closet for strips. So in the back of my mind I've been on the lookout for a way to utilize those strips that have been languishing. Cue Confessions of a Fabric Addict!

Sarah makes a ton of quilts and therefore generates a lot of scraps. She recently posted about how she put some of them to good use with minimal fuss. The lightbulb went off in my head as I read that post. Since then I've thinned out my collection of strips significantly. 😀

Now I have a box overfull with strips 8.5" long in varying widths.

These will provide for some wonderful mindless sewing. The trick is going to be finding a way to use the wider strips that are at the bottom of the box as well as the narrower ones on top. I want to keep them handy and I'd like to keep them from wrinkling as much as possible. It may just be a matter of finding a little bit bigger container for them. I had no idea I would fill Amazon.com's A1 box past it's capacity when I began!

Sarah is also working on the plans for this year's Hands2Help effort. There will be tutorials for quilts featuring rectangles (which I suppose are just large strips) along with guest bloggers and door prizes. I'm curious to see which organizations will be the beneficiaries of this year's quilts. 😊

Scrappy New Year

Are we really one week into the New Year already???!! Time sure got away from me since my SAL post! Partly that's due to the down time necessary to recover from chemical reactions. Needlework has taken place but I want to save that reveal for the next SAL. Like most everyone else I've been considering goals and options for my studio time this year. Nothing big has come of it yet. For now I'm just happy to have the studio cleaned up enough from Christmas to cut and sew in relative comfort. That's not to say that it's any better organized than it was before the holidays. 😉

I found the ideal project to ease back into quilt making activities in the new block drive for Covered in Love. Kat is asking for scrappy 10.5" string blocks, pieced on a fabric foundation. One thing that has been niggling at me in the back of my brain are the truly old prints still in my stash. I pulled one out today that is labeled from 1992 for crying out loud! These are not scraps like I would use for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge but larger pieces, almost yardage. (I rarely bought anything bigger than half a yard back in my early quilting career.) I decided to focus on those prints that have been languishing for years, figuring that I wouldn't miss them since I hadn't found a way to use them in all the time I've kept them. They became the fodder for my foundation squares. Here's one example:

I pieced the strips to the wrong side of the foundation fabric to diminish any shadowing through of the colors from the foundation. The first four blocks were made with precision cut strips. I typically cut 1.5," 2," 2.5," and 3" strips when I'm demolishing a piece of fabric. I cut other shapes too but right now we're just talking about strips.

While the strips were precision cut, I placed the various widths randomly on the foundations. After these four I turned to the box where I toss my random strips. These are the off-cuts of the backs of quilts or the trimmings at the end of a cutting session. Some in that box could be precision cut or even cut into squares or triangles but I didn't want to take the time. A lot of them are one width at one end  and then taper down to something less than 1.5" at the other end. I made two blocks with strips from that box...

And then went on to make four more!

I could keep on making these without any fear of running out of strips. There's no way I'm going to even try to empty the box however. I'll probably make a few more blocks and maybe by then I'll be ready to tackle one of the UFO's or block collections that are waiting to be turned into quilts or, who knows, even a brand new project!