Happy String Flimsy

This week I managed to get the first string quilt of the new year to its flimsy stage.  I really like the way it turned out!

I used the Crafted Applique technique for the leaves along the vine and the bird.  I have used this method of applique on a few other things in the past, with great success.

This time around, I had some issues with the adhesion of the appliques pieces to the background fabric, and I suspect it may have been due to one of two things, or maybe a combination:  (1) My new iron doesn't get as hot as my old one did, even on the "Max" setting;  (2) My jar of Mod Podge for Fabric is a couple years old and seemed a little thicker/drier than usual.  Maybe that affected its stickiness?

Nevertheless, the pieces did adhere long enough for me to keep them in place to edge-stitch down.  When I quilt the piece, everything will be further secured and it'll all be just fine.

For the outer border, I turned a black and white floral design fabric "wrong" side up, so that it would appear more muted and not detract from the central design.  I was a little hesitant at first, but I think it worked out well.

Norm hadn't seen this project at all until I had the flimsy on the design wall.  His first comment was something about The Partridge Family!  I had to laugh, as I had not thought of that at all.  But now that he mentioned it...

Maybe I was unconsciously channeling my '60s/'70s childhood?  And here I thought I was just making good use of the scraps in the solids bin.

Regardless, we may have hit upon an idea for a name for this little quilt!

Finishes and Starts

During the past couple of months, I finished the Carolina Chain quilt top.

It is patiently awaiting its trip to the longarm quilter at the moment, along with another one.  They have to age just right, you know!  :)

After that, I started a quilt to use some of my many (many, many) thrifted shirts. I had a bag of strips and shirttails left over from the Plaid Circles string quilt.  

The inspiration was a quilt by Nannette of New York. I thought it would be a good way to use up my extra strips in the centers of the blocks.

Here is a progress photo as of mid-November.  I have since finished piecing it and have begun webbing the top together.

That's been temporarily interrupted this week, however, with a little string quilt project I started, using the bin of black and white strings.

Some of these strings are eight or more years old, and they've been used in various other quilts. Like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one.

So they've been around the block several times, and are ready to be retired into this project, I think.  It should finish off a lot of them, and that makes me happy!

My inspiration is this quilt, "Hope for Tomorrow," found in the book Simply Strings by Rana Heredia.

I'm following the pattern more or less just roughly.  My available strings are dictating the size of the piece, which will hopefully end up being a nice sized wall hanging.  I'm a-okay with that.

Stringing in the New Year

I've seen some posts recently about a couple of string quilt-alongs getting off to a start.  There's one just underway at Moda and one about to get started at Humble Quilts.  

Well, sisters and brothers, I am IN.  I'll be stringing in the New Year!  It seems like the right time to hop back on the blogging train as well.

To say I love string quilts is putting it mildly.  I am Silly for String Quilts!  Which is what I named my Pinterest board several years ago, and there are now 600 gorgeous, string-a-licious pins on it.  You can check it out HERE. 

See what I mean?  

Feel free to also search the label string quilts on my blog's side bar or peruse the Gallery tab to see some of the string quilts and projects I've made in the past few years.

I have pulled some of my favorite string quilt books off the shelves and started paging through those, including the one my daughter just gave me for Christmas, String Fling by Bonnie Hunter.  I don't have her newest one, String Frenzy, yet, but it's on my wish list.

There will be no lack of inspiration, that's for sure!  

I'm excited to get started on something.  Not sure what just yet, but the wheels are turning, as this glimpse of my sewing table shows.

It may be a mess of a different color tomorrow, but this was the little bunny trail I found myself on this morning after opening just the first bin.

Will you be stringing in the New Year?

Checking In

Where, oh where has the summer gone?  I know it's not quite over yet, thankfully, but it's winding down and I feel like I haven't much to show for it and haven't done all the things yet.

(Cattle grazing along a bike trail.)

But I have gotten a couple items moved along, for however much (or little) time has been spent in the sewing room.  Specifically, the String-X quilt is now quilted and finished.  

I am planning to gift it to a nephew (who doesn't read this blog—I don't think, anyway).  He's an avid hunter and has a birthday in a couple months.  I'm hoping he will like the fall colors.

I had a couple extra blocks left, so I made two throw pillows.  One to go along with the quilt and one to keep.

Recently, the hubs and I took a little road trip to the southwestern part of the state.  

(View from Wyalusing State Park overlooking the Mississippi River - note smoke haze in distance from western wildfires)

I took my sewing machine along and worked on some Carolina Chain piecing in the evenings.

I thought I had cut enough strips/pieces for the quilt, but when I came to the end of the fabric I'd cut for the predominantly light blocks, I counted them up and compared it to the pattern instructions, and realized I was only ONE-THIRD of the way done making them!  And that was just the light ones.  Then there were the same number of predominantly dark ones to make. Augh!

When you're only part way through making the same quilt pieces (and, let's be honest, bored with the process), what do YOU do?  

Soldier on?  Work on something else?  Cut more bits?  Put it away completely for a while?  Bake some brownies?

(Recipe HERE)

All viable options.  What I decided (after baking the brownies) was to reduce the size of the quilt and change the layout from on-point to straight on (or whatever that's called), and probably add a stop border and an outer border, when I get that far.

That's the current plan, anyway.  Stay tuned...

In putzing around the sewing room, I recently rediscovered a piece of vintage decorator weight fabric among the stash.  It was fairly small and had a gnarly seam running through it (by the manufacturer), but I thought it might make a nice tea towel if I could piece it together somehow.  

But I know me.  If it's "too nice" a fabric, I won't want to get it all stained up using it.  And how many "nice" tea towels do I currently have languishing in drawers, unused?  (Answer: Quite enough already.)  

Looking around my sewing space a few days later, I spied my flatbed scanner with its vintage embroidered dresser scarf tossed over it as a dust cover.  Thus, a plan was hatched to go ahead and make the tea towel but use the piece as a new scanner cover.

And it makes me smile to now see it in use, serving a function versus decorating a different drawer.

(Courthouse Steps quilt in children's bedroom at Villa Louis.)

We toured an historic mansion, Villa Louis, on our recent getaway.  There were some beautiful antique quilts on some of the beds.

(Log cabin quilt in butler's quarters at Villa Louis.)

(Metal insert in door arch at Villa Louis.)

And I thought this metal insert in a high door arch was quilting inspiration, too!

There were a few stops along the way for fabric shopping.  A Ben Franklin store had a small table of fabrics at $2.99 per yard!  I bought a few.

 
At another very nice quilt shop, I left empty-handed but took a picture of this cool steampunk-inspired vintage sewing machine turned lamp. 

Pretty cool, huh?

Circle Quilt Finish

I finished the Circle of Friends quilt top—or was it Friendship Circle?  Hang on, un momento, while I check Facebook for the name I was going to give this quilt...

Okay, I checked.  Its name will be Friendship 360.

My brain is like a sieve some days, I swear.

(Spotted on a recent visit to the antique mall.)

In my defense (albeit a weak one), I finished this quilt top three weeks ago.  I can barely remember what I had for lunch, much less what I thought to name a quilt way back in mid-July.

(Friendship 360 Quilt Top)

ANYway, here it is!  

This quilt combines the circles I made during the Quilty 365 quilt-along during 2016 with the Friendship Star Wreath that I also made during that time.  

The Friendship Star Wreath was just a little bunny trail I took with the scraps I had left from the Quilt for Pulse.  The tutorial for it can be found here.  Since I was using leftover HSTs from the Pulse quilt, my dimensions were different than what was given in the tutorial (mine used 4.5-inch strips and HST blocks versus 3-inch).

The end result was a 36.5-inch square, which I was going to make into a wall hanging.  You know, some day.  It got put aside, is what I'm saying.  Literally moved to the far corner of the playground (i.e. design wall) and ignored while I did other stuff in 2016, including the Quilty 365 circles.

At the end of 2016, I really had no idea how to arrange all those circles together in a quilt.  I watched my fellow 365-ers finish lovely quilts in various ways.  Meanwhile, I had no real plan.  The circle blocks sat in colorful piles in the sewing room.  I'd pick up a few and riffle through them now and then or move them from one surface to another.

Then one day as I was milling around the laundry room, looking absently at the Friendship Star Wreath on the far end of the design wall, it dawned on me that it might work as a center medallion with the Quilty 365 circles.

Why it took so long to put the two together is...well, irrelevant.  The point is I finally did, and it worked.  Hooray!  Also, Ta-Da!

Now, full disclosure:  I only made 338 circles in 2016.  A detail I forgot until I was putting the circles together and ran short.  So I had to make a few more on the fly.  No big whoop, and kinda fun, actually, to be making these again.  Thankfully, I still had enough of the same or similar background fabrics and even my little cardboard circle template made from a Kleenex box.

I assembled the circle blocks into panels.  First the sides, at 9 blocks high x 6 blocks wide. These were sewn to the right and left of the center medallion.  Then the top and bottom panels, at 9 blocks high x 21 blocks wide.

And I still didn't get all the way to 365, because I only needed 360 circle blocks for the quilt top.  Hence, Friendship 360, and also because a circle is, of course, 360 degrees.  See what I did there?

You'd think its name would have been easier to remember!  But no matter, I'm pretty sure the quilt itself—with its I-spy, whimsical, colorful circles—will be unforgettable.