Cue Strings!

Scratching a few itches for me at the moment is the String Fever Quilt Along hosted by Rachel at Stitched in Color. It's giving me a chance to eat into my massive box of neutral scraps, make my first quilt from a more traditional block, and have a project focused completely on playing with line and colour, and not connected to sewing for custom orders or gifts.



I rifled through my big collection of low value scraps, found all my strips, made some more and put them in this bamboo bowl. My main goal for this quilt has been to relax. At first that meant making one block at a time, enjoying the choosing of prints and the slow pace. When that was no longer fulfilling, I started 'chain' piecing blocks like this:

I'm just choosing a long string, gradually adding my incomplete blocks and then at the end of the strip, I add more strips or little scrappy squares to start new blocks. Once the blocks get to over 8", I trim them with my fluoro yellow 8" square. (I'm sorry manufacturers, but WHY forest green and fluoro yellow??)

Making them this way has my little pile of log cabins growing really quickly even thought I'm only doing little bits at a time. And because I'm always starting new ones, they don't all look the same despite being put through the machine together on the one fabric strip. I'm thinking, just for fun, I might make a collection of 4.5" blocks and one big 15.5" (have I done the maths right?) block, to mix it up a bit. What do you think?