My Scrappy Summer - Stringing Along

Like many quilters, I tend to save every little scrap of fabric leftover from the projects I make.   And when I say every little scrap, I mean every little scrap.  If it is a strip more than 1" wide or a square larger than 3", chances are it's going to end up in my scrap bin.  If it's smaller than that it goes into the basket of scraps that I give to a gal I know who uses them to stuff dog beds for the animal shelter.

I have those scraps roughly organized by size/type into some stacking bins.  One section is full of small odd sized pieces, one has strips of varying sizes, and the other two have larger scraps - like maybe 1/8 - 1/4 yard pieces.

The hope of course is that I will be able to use those scraps in some future quilts.  But it seems like every time I look through the scraps thinking I'll find just what I need for whatever project I'm working on, nothing seems quite right.  So those scrap bins keep getting more and more full to the point where it was feeling like the scrap situation was really getting out of hand.  I was even considering dumping everything into the dog bed basket just to get rid of it.

Then in May I went to the monthly Tucson Quilter's Guild meeting.  During "show and tell" I saw a string quilt that one of the members made and a lightbulb went off in my head.  String quilts are a great way to use up scraps!  Right then and there I decided I would go home and make a string quilt.  I figured that would use up most of what I had and get my scraps back under control.

Traditionally string quilts are sewn onto a foundation of some kind.  Usually a square of muslin or newspaper or even pages from old phone books.  I've always felt that using muslin was a waste of fabric and made the resulting quilt too heavy and I wasn't thrilled with the idea of having to remove paper from a bunch of quilt blocks.  So I opted to go with a more improvisational approach.

Based on a suggestion from my friend Merry Kay, I decided to use only white, off white, or other really light colored fabric for the center strip on each block.  And then I thought I would separate out the rest of my scraps into light and dark piles and put light fabrics on one side of the center strip and dark fabrics on the other.  As it turns out though, the majority of my scraps were all more in the bright/medium range rather than dark and light.  So I did the best I could and ended up with piles of dark"ish" and light"ish" fabrics.

Then I cut my center fabrics into random width strips and subcut those down to about  10" or 11" each to span the diagonal of a 6 1/2" square - the size I had chosen for my blocks.

From there I just started adding strips (also cut into random widths) using my 6 1/2" square ruler as a template to rough cut the strips down to size as I went.

Once I got enough strips sewn onto either side of the center strip, I trimmed the block down to size.  I kept going until I ran out of the center strips I had pre-cut.

It was fun trying out different layouts for the resulting blocks and ultimately I decided on an off-set diamond pattern.

I had some bold floral fabric in my stash that I loved but had never found a use for and this seemed like the perfect project for it.  So that became the border.

Just Stringing Along

I am so happy with the result.  I love this quilt and had tons of fun making it.  

BUT as it turns out, this barely seemed to make a dent in my scrap stash.  In fact I felt like somehow my pile of scraps had grown larger instead of smaller.  By now though, I was on a mission to use up those scraps.  Thus began "My Scrappy Summer."  Stay tuned for future blog posts about the other scrap quilts I've been making over the last couple of months.