#string quilt

I figured out the setting on my phone to get the colors to come out decent.  

Here’s one showing the neutral border: 

It was supposed to be the cream color all around, but I had a little Math Difficulty when I was figuring out how wide I could make it with the amount of fabric I had.  Luckily, I was close enough that I could make up the shortage in a way that looks intentional--I have those light brown squares in all four corners.  

Here’s a closeup that shows the colors better:

And here’s a test section of the patterned border that I’m thinking of adding:  

Three blocks for my string quilt WIP that I made at 221BCon, while hanging out in Mrs. Hudson’s room. Featuring “Sherlock fabric” (not really but close) and bacon 🥓

Here are a couple of images of completed ones, borrowed from the website for Heartstrings--a virtual sewing circle that makes string quilts for charitable causes--just to give you the idea:

I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to piece mine with sashing (as in the second picture) or straight block-to-block, as in the first picture.  

To make a string quilt, or typing paper quilt, you take squares of paper and sew strips of fabric together across them, usually diagonally.  Here are some strips and the paper squares from my stepmother’s work bag:

The big advantage of this method is that you can use strips of varying widths and lengths, using the paper foundation to trim the squares down to uniform size.  That way, you’re spared a lot of fiddly measuring and cutting at the beginning of your project.   

And here are some finished squares:

My stepmother had done 78 of them.  Judging by the amount of paper and strips left, she may have meant to do a lot more, but I worked out that I can make a reasonably-sized quit with eight rows across and ten down--it’ll be a little smaller than a twin size, but I can add sashing and a border to bring it up to size.  That left me with only two more squares to piece. 

 The two on the left are the ones I did--you can see they look just about as good, but it took me about three hours just to do those two.  The back side of the squares show a little more about how the process works, and the reason my two squares took so long:

The uppermost square, on the right, is my stepmother’s piecing; the one on the left/underneath is mine.  She machine-pieced, but I never got the hang of using a sewing machine, so I’m stuck hand-piecing.  Hand-sewing through a stiff piece of printer paper is kind of a pain in the ass.  (You can buy special paper that is easier to work with, and if I end up needing to piece more squares, I’ll get some.)  

When you tear the paper backing off, the back of the square looks like this:

This is one of my stepmother’s; I haven’t dared tear the paper off mine yet.  Here’s the right side of the same square, for comparison:

The most usual size for squares in this type of quilting is 8.5 inches, the square you can most easily make out of a piece of typing paper.  My stepmother, however, did 6.5 inch squares.  I’m planning to start by piecing them into groups of four--I’m not sure if that’s what she was planning to do or not, but the 6.5 squares would then yield 12-inch blocks which is a fairly standard size for quilt blocks.  

Here I laid some out to get an idea of how it’ll look:

The corners will meet more neatly when it’s actually sewn. 

If I decide to go with sashing, it’ll be around those four-square blocks.  My stepmother’s stash for this project includes several big pieces of the neutral fabrics, including this dark brown.  I’m guessing she was thinking of using those for sashing, but I’m not actually sure. 

Once I get a few of the four-square blocks pieced, I’ll lay them out, with the different sashing fabrics and without sashing, to figure out what I want to do. 

Besides the materials for this quilt, I also inherited two big totes full of fabric, and her quilting hoop and sewing box.  The fabric includes a fair few pieced blocks left over from various other quilts she did.  Once I get this quilt done, I’m planning to assemble those into a sampler quilt--I did that once before, with blocks I found in a thrift shop; it’s a little tricky because of the blocks not being all the same size, but it turned out OK.