String Quilts

My first string quilt

My nephew Oliver with his quilt

I LOVE the look of string quilts, and LOVE that it's a great way to use up scraps of fabric.  But I don't like the paper piecing part of it.  Ashley at filminthefridge.com has a great tutorial on paper piecing string quilts -- and hers are BEAUTIFUL.

I've never been very good at following recipes, patterns, etc -- I'd rather make up my own.  So I came up with two different ways to do string quilts.  For Oliver's quilt, I used squares of green Kona solid instead of paper for the foundation.  Each quilt block ended up being quite thick, but that's ok -- then I just skipped the batting for this quilt, and used soft minky dots on the back.  I quilted random diagonal lines on this one -- a bit hard to see in these pictures, but it looked great.  If I could do this one again, however, I would make sure that the middle strips of each of the squares were the same size.  I like the scrappiness/wonky look of the quilt in general, but I'd like the middle green strips to be the same.

Next I tried a quilt as you go doll-sized quilt -- this was an experiment to see if a quilt-as-you-go string quilt would "work" for a larger sized quilt (queen sized) or not.  This doll quilt looks really cute, but the back is pretty lumpy from the thick seams (batting plus several layers of fabric) -- bummer!

My conclusion: next time I'll do the paper piecing!