Design Wall Monday

On Saturday I attended a fun "in person" sewing day with my guild members. I have been attending regularly via zoom, but gosh I missed being with people during the covid years! Zoom is fun, but there is nothing like actually being together and working on donation quilts with "like minded" quilters!

We had a wonderful day of sewing string blocks. I worked on sewing together the purple blocks that other guild members had made. I brought my 1952 Featherweight sewing machine for this outing. At first she had a bit of trouble with the tension (out of practice!) but I was able to fix it and she did a great job of getting these blocks sewn together.

Here are the string blocks on the design wall. I am still leaning to the chevron layout and look forward to making more purple string blocks to add to this collection. Notice the occasional pieced strings which add character to the project and use up smaller pieces 💜💜💜

I went to the sew day with no projects to work on and just wanted to help with whatever was needed. 

And I came home with THREE projects! This is the other string piecing project I adopted. I'm sure you can see why I couldn't let it stay at the orphanage! I love these blocks and can't wait to make more of them!

Linking up to Judy's Design Wall Monday

Dust off a Quilt Book - Scrappy Strings

Welcome to the "Dust off a Quilt book" blog hop hosted by Bea! 
I learned to love books early in my life because my Mom was a teacher librarian. We have always been surrounded by books and conversation about books. 

Liberated String Quilts by Gwen Marston

Although many types of digital options are now available for reading, I still prefer a real paper book.
Most quilters I know have amassed an extensive collection of inspirational books. Some books are purchased to sew a specific quilt pattern from the book, some are to enjoy the "eye candy', some are purchased to support a beloved writer/designer/quilter, and some are purchased to learn new creative ways of thinking or stitching. 
When Bea created the "Dust off a quilt book" blog hop, I started looking at some of my old favourites and was drawn to my Gwen Marston books, especially her Liberated String Quilts book. 

String piecing on batting

There is so much going on right now in quilt land about string piecing, and I have an "embarrassment of riches" in the string department. 
I started my quilt on the Moda String Along day and made some progress. I am using up the long pieces of batting trimmed from the sides of a finished quilt. You know when your quilt is 80" and the batting is 90", so you have a 10" strip of batting that you cut off? What do you do with that strip? 
I thought these long batting strips would be a perfect foundation for a string quilt. Here are some of my first strips under the needle, putting through one after the other leader-ender style. 

Although Gwen's book talks about "foundation free methods", I decided to make a quilt-as-you-go style string quilt for the blog hop. I pieced the strings onto a batting that has a solid colour backing fabric underneath. Once the strings are all pieced, the quilting is done and you just have to join the sections together for a finished quilt. Well, you also have to put on a binding too, but you know how much I love doing that!


Here are the first two strips sewn, with a sashing strip being auditioned on the right.
Such a wide variety of scraps in these pieces!

I tried to use each fabric only once, but apparently there are a few repeats. And what are the chances of randomly piecing two sections of strings and having the exact same pink fabric meet in the middle?!? 


I had to separate these two strips and put one on the left of the quilt and one on the right.

Here is the photo of sewing the sections together. The dark brown sashing will be on the front of the quilt and the gold sashing will be on the back of the quilt.

Once the sashing is attached to the front and back of the pieced units, I sew the sections together. This is how it looks joining the sashing to the next section... it's tricky!

And this is how it looks when I am machine stitching down the final line of stitching on the edge of the sashing. Usually I do this with hand stitching, but I didn't have time to do that if I wanted to be able to finish this quilt in time for the blog hop! This beaded awl with a wicked point was the perfect tool for holding the edge in place while sewing. 



Here is the finished quilt placed sideways on the design wall. The finished measurement is 40" x 60".

There are so many wonderful bits and pieces of fabric in this quilt. I love that each string is leftover from another project, and found a new life in this quilt. And I love that each section is a different width depending on the piece of batting that I was using up. I plan to donate this quilt to the comfort quilt collection at my local quilt guild.

This is how the quilt looks from the back. I used up a collection of solid fabrics that were given to me. I don't enjoy sewing with solids but they make a great looking quilt backing.



I encourage you to visit the other blogs in the blog hop and here's the list for today... ENJOY!

Tuesday Feb 19^th

Cindy Stitchin at home

Jennifer at curlicuecreations

Stephanie at stephjacobsondesigns

Kathy at Kathysquilts (that's me!)

Shasta at high road quilter
Theresa at bumbleberrystitches

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.

String-Along!

Serendipity...
the quilting world is exploding with lots of fun inspiration and opportunities to do some string piecing. Step #4 of the Good Fortune mystery involved string piecing and it was really fun.

Bonnie Hunter's new book called String Frenzy has just been published. I have been drooling over the quilts and reading every word. I love a well written, concisely organized book. And is it weird if I even love the smell of this book!!?!??? LOL

Humble Quilts is having a stringalong for 2019 with a linky party at the end of each month, so I'll be participating in that for sure.

AND there is a Moda String-Along happening TODAY with a block check in on January 7th. My friend Debby is coming over and we are going to sew until we drop. I'm going to start with these two bags of scraps.


In February Bea is hosting a "Dust off a quilt book" blog hop. I had already signed up and wanted to make a string quilt based on Gwen Marston's string book. 
And now everywhere I look I am surrounded by string projects, string books, and string quiltalongs. 

Maybe I have died and gone to heaven?!?!

After I finish sewing the two big bags of scraps above, I'll start in on this huge bin and make a fantastic string quilt for Bea's blog hop.

***AND... step #6 of the Good Fortune mystery was posted today and guess what? 
More string piecing!

Linking up to Oh Scrap!