Glimpses of Spring & Strings

The snow has been melting little by little every day, and the patches of bare ground are expanding. This morning, I heard a robin.

March is a fickle month in the upper Midwest. It can be 45 degrees one day and a blizzard the next. Kind of like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. Eventually, though, you get spring.

I took some time yesterday and today to work up a block for a quilt I've had my eye on for a while. It is pictured in a book called String Quilts with Style, by Bobbie Aug and Sharon Newman, and it's just that--a picture. There are no instructions for this particular quilt; it's just a gallery example of an awesome string quilt.

Personally, I think ALL string quilts are awesome. I've never met one I didn't like--a lot. I feel the same way about pinwheel quilts.

I should mention, then, that this quilt is not just a string quilt. It's a pinwheel string quilt. In fact, it's a double pinwheel string quilt!

Without written instructions and just a photo as a reference, I was left to fly by the seat of my pants. I busted out the old plastic protractor to determine the angle of the double pinwheel. Twenty degrees was about right. Then I did some futzing around with cardboard templates and basic geometry.

Thankfully, I did not have to bust out the Pythagorean theorem. Because I totally would have had to Wikipedia that.

There are more bias edges in this thing than I'm used to, so I am trying to be extra careful with sewing and pressing along those edges. I am piecing the strings on old phone book pages as a foundation, cut to 8-1/2 inches square. In case you're wondering (as I was) whether the ink on those pages transfers or smears, it does not, even with repeated pressing. The paper tears off nicely too.

Looks like I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on the inner points of the red pinwheels.

So it's off to a somewhat fiddly start, but I think it's going to be worth it.