Monday, November 02, 2009

Reversible String Quilt


Thanks to a string quilt block swap on Swap-Bot, I made three dozen string blocks -- I had a LOT OF string scraps, in fact, I still have a lot but not nearly as many as before. A dozen of those string blocks were swapped, in two sets of six. Then I received two sets of six.

Interestingly, the sets I received were different from mine -- one was narrower strings and very carefully on a perfect diagonal, the other set had wider strips and were on a more acute diagonal and my own were between the two, somewhat wider strings, diagonal varied somewhat because strings were not all the same width from end to end, throwing off the diagonal a bit.

So I decided to use the Sharon Pederson method of piecing blocks together. It's autumn and I was feeling in that frame of mind so I selected fabrics in the orange-brown-green range. for the piecing and borders, as the photos show, a light beige-on-beige for the string side and a medium brown with a subtle gold print pattern for the other side.

With this method of putting the blocks together they are easy to quilt individually before putting together so then only the border needs to be quilted. I really like this method as quilting smallish squares is very easy. As one can see I used a tilted square spiral [is that an oxymoron?] and did it free form, no pattern. Super quick and easy. The Greek key on the border seemed congruent to the other design.

The quilt actually is square it was being held tightly at the top. I hope a day will come when I will figure out how to photograph quilts nice and square and clearly without one side being more shadowed than the other. I think it will require both a new camera and some lessons or directives. But I thought I'd post this as I haven't posted any quilt photos for a while and I HAVE been quilting although not a lot.

3 comments :

Evelyn said...

That looks so much better than I thought it would when I first saw those blocks! I was worried that the varying angles wouldn't look so hot, but I think the added sashing made them work together just fine. It looks really wonderful!

June Calender said...

I was worried in that sense too. But I beleive in the old fashioned scrappy, imperfect look and this does work. The matchy-matchy approach is needed for many quilts but that can get sterile and cramped feeling, we're not machines. I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately.

Fabricmom said...

Great job. Love that you used sashing.