Wednesday, January 09, 2019

Stringing Along

Since my String-Along blog post I have been sewing up the strings in my scrap bins. I'm trying out a "quilt-as-you-go" version of string piecing, sewing scraps onto long pieces of batting. 

You know the pieces you cut off the sides of quilts? We all have these batting scraps, but what to do with them?
I have written a few blog posts over the years about how I have used batting scraps such as joining them together into larger pieces, using them in small projects, for dog beds, etc.


Now I am using the long pieces in a string piecing project. It's a bit of a challenge to deal with the long units, and you can see how I have rolled up the excess and clipped it together on the ends. That has worked fairly well.

As I'm sewing, I've been singing to myself a song called "Swinging Along", which is a song my parents used to sing in the car when we went on childhood holidays. It brings me very happy memories! Of course I change the lyrics to "stringing along" LOL
I'm making a version of a quilt from Gwen Marston's book called String Quilts for Bea's "Dust off a quilt book" blog hop in February. I'm off to a good start and am happy with how it's coming along. The great thing about this method is once the strings are sewn together, it's already quilted. 


I do find that I can only work on a string project for a certain period of time, and then I start to feel overwhelmed by the disaster of a mess that gets generated from the scraps. I'll work on this periodically as mess tolerance allows and hope to finish it in time for the blog hop next month.

10 comments:

Frog Quilter said...

That's really a great idea. Thanks for the info.

The Cozy Quilter said...

Hey...I have that book! I am in the midst of cleaning up my sewing room so no messy projects will be undertaken any time soon! I am purging a little bit...I have been watching the tidying up show on netflix and some of my fabric no longer brings me joy. One of the guilds I belong to has a yard sale every year...hopefully, my purged fabric will bring joy to someone else.

TakeMeThereTotes said...

I like this idea, a lot! How do you end up attaching a backing fabric? I was looking at all of my long strips of batting just yesterday and was about to throw them away but you may have just saved them for another useful project.

TakeMeThereTotes said...

Looking closer I do see you have zig zagged a backing piece to the batting. Okay i get it now. This is a great idea!

ThreadCatcher said...

Interesting idea. I look forward to seeing the finished project.

Louise said...

Your QAYG strings are looking mighty fine! Have you chosen a method to join the pieces into the final quilt?

MissPat said...

Like Louise, I'm waiting to see how you will join your strips. This is a great way to use up those batting cut-off as well as the strings.
Pat

Jeanne said...

Oh, good idea for the batting scraps!

Sherry said...

Thanks for sharing your idea for quilting as you go. I hope to try some of that when I get to working on using up scraps. Hopefully very soon!

Mystic Quilter said...

Now that is a really good idea - thanks for passing on to us.