Welcome to Treadlestitches!
It's still summer here, over 80 degrees every day which is unusual for late September. My only complaint is the lack of rain, but we may get some this weekend.As long as the weather holds, I'll be taking pictures outside. I'm calling this little quilt Rainbow Strings, and it's my first Rainbow Scrap Challenge finish for 2024's blocks.
The border is a dark print, in honor of September being dark month at the RSC. Just kidding, I just liked it with the strings because of all the colors. It looks like fireworks to me. I bought this piece in an antique shop in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were there for the eclipse.
The quilting is diagonal lines in serpentine stitch, 3 lines across each 6 in. square.
There will be more string quilts to come, as I made a LOT of string blocks this year.
Black Blocks
Black scraps are fun in these potato chip blocks! This block has 2 penguin prints, 2 cat prints, buttons, jelly beans, stars, stripes, and a Harry Potter symbol.
Also, I made these black hexagon blocks for my 1800s reproduction quilt. They look kind of dull just by themselves...
Breaking Bad Habits (or Trying To)
This mess is evidence of one of my Bad Habits. Most of these pieces are leftovers from backing. For many years I have mostly used light fabrics for backing (can you tell?). When I finished a quilt and trimmed off the extra backing, I had the bad habit of just stuffing the backing strips in a basket for "later".
Well, it's later. I have more time now that my grandsons are in school all day, so my excuse for not dealing with this has evaporated. Oh, dear. This is a LOT.
Step one was sorting out the few colorful prints and trimming them up into useful pieces. There weren't very many, so that didn't take long. Next, I divided the light strips into piles by width--small, medium, and large. For the next week, I would take a pile to the ironing board, iron at least 10 strips, and trim them to useful widths. If they were too short, I cut them into squares and/or rectangles. It felt great to finish a pile, and that helped me keep going.
This is what I ended up with. The strips are 4.5 in., 3.5 in., 2.5 in, and 2 in. wide. All this has been added to the Parts Department for future quilts. And now when I finish a quilt, I'm cutting up the backing strips as soon as I trim the quilt!
Have a wonderful week, fellow quilters!
Thanks for reading,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches
Check out all the great quilt blogs at these links:
So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge
Your string quilt is so pretty, Sylvia! I love how it makes X's and O's. Fun to see how you're using those black prints, too - I've had some of those penguins in my stash in the past! Great job tacking the scrap bin - you're getting lots of useful pieces out of them.
ReplyDeleteJust lovely Rainbow Strings quilt--nice work on this!!:)))
ReplyDeleteYour little black blocks are really adorable...
Straightening out the scrap stash is always a long process--but i love pulling out older, much=loved fabrics to use again--even just little bits of them. Hugs, Julierose
Love all your photos! I have a backing pile too. And piles of narrow leftover batting too. Time to attack it.
ReplyDeleteLove your string finish! String quilts make me smile! As for the backing. . .been there. . .so I feel what you are doing. A little at a time and you will have more bits for future projects.--TerryK@OnGoingProjects
ReplyDelete