The scrappy string quilt is finished!




The finished quilt on a beautiful day.

     A few rainy days off, and I made great progress in finishing up the scrappy string quilt. The top had been completed for some time, and I finally got around to quilting it all together.



I love the wild mix of colors and prints.

     I ended up quilting it pretty heavily, using the squares within the red lines as a template.    I wasn't too concerned over whether the lines were straight, which is a good thing, since none are.   The block itself was about 11 inches, and was a bit too  large area to quilt easily,  and I found myself wishing for a long arm machine!

A close up of the quilted blocks.






A close up of the meandering quilting.



     I wanted the red lines to stand out, and so I used my walking foot to stitch in the ditch on each side of the red strips. I used red thread on the top, and white on the back, and was happy that very few spots of red show through on the back.

My walking foot in action.
 

      I have seen several quilts on line where the backing fabric was from IKEA, but unfortunately, there is no IKEA in this area. Luckily, my sister lives near an IKEA and got me some. I patched the IKEA yardage together with some other leftover backing, and used two blocks that were left over for the back!

 

 



The back of the quilt.

     The photo below really shows the dense quilting, the lack of straight lines, and the success of my red and white thread effort! 

 

         Since this project had been an attempt to use up some of my years of scraps,  


My former scrap basket contents!

 I decided to use left over binding pieces for this scrappy quilt.    I never seem to actually plan how much binding to make, and usually have too much, which I guess is better than making too little.  



My basket of binding leftovers.  I ended up using  up the black dot, the green with red dots and a little bit of the solid yellow for this quilt.



A view of part of the finishing binding with the black dots. 

     I love how this quilt turned out!  It is really soft and crinkly with all that quilting, and contains so many reminders of earlier quilts.   The string piecing was pretty easy to do, and a great way to use up all those scraps.  I may try one with a limited number of fabrics and see how that turns out.  Maybe a baby quilt!   

 

     Next week I will reveal a new quilt that has been under wraps, since it is a gift.    Until then, take care. 

 

Gretchen