String Quilt

I love scrappy quilts. You know, the ones that have all kinds of fabrics thrown together and somehow, miraculously, look as though the color and fabric placements were planned and meant to be. It takes a leap of faith to just pull fabrics out of a bin and put them next to each other. Some quilters just can't make that leap - and that's perfectly ok! 

This first quilt is one I made several years ago as a charity quilt with my quilt guild. The white strips were but at 1.5" and the only requirement for the additional strips was bright colors. Some of these blocks were made by me from my own fabric stash and the rest were made by others in the guild. 
I've been saving my strips for a while and had a bin full of left over strips of binding. I saw an idea about using dryer sheets as a foundation for making these strip blocks, so I saved my used dryer sheets. 
The dryer sheets are about 6"x9", so I figured a grid of 10 blocks by 9 blocks would make a good sized lap quilt and a grid of 11 by 10 blocks would make a good sized twin quilt and set off to see how many blocks I could make with the strips I had on hand and before I was tired of making them!
The white strips in this version were cut at 1" wide, making a very narrow 1/2" white strip diagonally across the center of each block. I just eye balled it from one corner of the dryer sheet to the other. The colored strips were cut in a variety of sizes from 1" wide to 2.25" wide. 
I didn't think too much about placement of fabrics other than to not put the same color next to each other and because I had a lot of green strips, to try to have at least one or two strips of green in each block. There's everything in this quilt from bright fabrics to solids to Christmas, to whatever I've sewn in the past many years. 

My strips bin is almost empty and I'm on the last couple rows of a lap size quilt. Even though I would love this to be twin sized, I'm ok with it only being a lap quilt. I've got a couple choices for a backing and the next time you see this, it will be ready for quilting. 

What do you think? Are you a scrappy quilt lover? Can you sew randomly, without matching or coordinating colors? 

--Ann


Comments

  1. Kathy N10 April 2024 at 20:08

    Glad to see you blogging. I’ve been hearing from a few people about quilting on drier sheets. I do like the white stripe.

    ReplyDelete

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