Accidental (Quilt Top) Tourist

My quote from yesterday: "I think I accidentally made a quilt top today." The short story: I did something to my right leg on Saturday - seems like a minor quadriceps strain - and since Jeff was out of state all weekend, I opted to stay home and stay off my leg to let it rest.

Idle minds…

…find the equilter scrap bag and say, OOOOH I WONDER WHAT TROUBLE I COULD GET INTO — LOOK! COLORS!

Thirty minutes later, I had the entire bag of scrap strips (maybe 3-4 pounds out of the original 5-pound bag?) spread out over the table. I'd been looking at photos of string quilts anyway, and I knew that's what these strips should be used for. One thing tends to lead to another, and when I next looked up, I had them all sorted out by color. (Also, I had Tenzing's undivided attention.)

I wanted to do a string quilt, but realistically, it's hard to make them not look alike. It requires planning — and a lot of strips! — to deviate from the standard, which looks like this:

image 'String Quilt Updated' by The Treacys

So, I thought … what if I put the strips together by color? and didn't do triangles? In what seemed like no time at all, I had

['Experimentation']

and I thought, hey, my leg's aching and why don't I just keep at it? Which led to

['Almost done']

and me realizing that at a finished size of 8" each, I was pretty close to making an entire quilt top. Also, my Sunday had disappeared into the quiet whirr of my sewing machine.

Here's what they look like up close.  After cutting the strips to roughly 8 3/4", I sew them together like this:

['Strip … tease?']

and then I trim up the blocks to 8.5" square:

[' Crosshairs on the 8.5" ']

The end result looks neat and clean and totally intentional. This block wasn't a specific color; it's from the "multicolored, light" pile:

['Not bad, for "waste" fabric']

I'll get better photos tonight, once I've trimmed the squares up and set them atop some white fabric. That should make the colors pop, which they assuredly do not do when they're set atop my dark-green kitchen floor. Or, underneath Tenzing:

['Off to the chief inspector']

I'm not wholly certain who is getting this one yet. I have a couple of people in mind. More info on that soon enough.

Photoset: http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157623723191512/
Link to this quilt: http://domesticat.net/quilts/crayon-box

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