Comes with Strings Attached - Good Fortune, Part 6

Are we there yet? Not yet. We have string piecing with neutrals to make this week.  I am close to using up some of my neutrals, and  I am still going to need some to finish up the pieces I must make for weeks 1 through 5. Fortunately, there will be sales at some of the local fabric stores right after the end of the year.

This time, our sets of strips are a lot larger and need either a full phone book page or a full piece of notebook paper.

I thought this would go faster, because it was string piecing. It didn't, but it was still fun. Maybe it was because Susan and Sophia came over to sew with me and too much talking happened. Maybe it was because it was hard to get a lot of variety in my blocks without enough variety in my fabrics. Each set of strips had eight to twelve different fabrics in it. I tried to achieve greater variety by varying the width of the strips, and, of course, by varying the order of the strips.

Is it okay to use the same fabric twice in the same strip set? I don't know, but I avoided this, for the most part. I also tried to limit the number of strips that had a blue or green design on them. I want these pieces to look overwhelmingly neutral. Yeah, I know. I'm putting way too much thought into this.

Let's see what the others did on Bonnie Hunter's Week 6 Mystery Link-up. And here is what I did:

Lessons Learned:

• It's harder to sew strings together in larger blocks and using full phone book pages. Be careful to keep the fabric flat on the paper so your finished size will be accurate. It slips around and bunches up at the ends. If it bunches up, tear off the paper before cutting the final blocks out.
• Don't use phone book pages with light colored fabric. Tiny pieces of the paper get stuck under the stitches and some of those have black ink on them.
• Each page has at least 8 strips, so the more fabrics, the better. Twelve different fabrics isn't enough.
• Sew with friends.

String Theory - Good Fortune, Part 4

This week we are making orange pieces for the mystery quilt. Bonnie Hunter recommends using the string piecing technique. Should I be worried?

It was EASY and it was FUN. I didn't really know what it was, but it turns out that I had used this method once before, in Rayna Gilman's class, and I blogged about it here: Reinventing the Secret Garden.

The great thing about string piecing is you don't have to measure with exactness, you don't have to cut with exactness, and you don't have to sew with exactness. This adds up to a FAST process.

Bonnie added a very interesting twist to string piecing. She uses pages from an old phone book as a base for sewing the pieces together. Again, no measuring, etc. Do take a look at Bonnie's Mystery Link-up to see what others are doing: Week 4 Link-up

I was amazed that it was so easy to sew on phone book pages and even to iron them. And Bonnie thought this through really well. She suggested using a larger needle and smaller stitches to make it easier to tear off the paper later. 

Here some strips that have been sewn onto phone book paper. They will be trimmed into three blocks each.

I had about 10 or 12 different orange fabrics. I thought that would be enough variety, but it probably isn't. I have used 5 or 6 different fabrics in each piece. I felt like all of my string sets were too similar. It will be hard to tell until the final mystery clue is revealed. It might not be a problem at all.

These orange blocks demanded that I store them in an orange box.

I made some wonky strips. These strips looked a lot less wonky when I cut the block into three pieces and the strips became very short. I had to be careful that they didn't get too narrow or too wide at the ends.

Wonk, wonk

I also made some wonky blocks by trimming them at a slant. I'm not sure if these will look good in the final quilt. I don't think I'm going to make any more of these. Yes, I admit, I didn't finish this easy-clue-week assignment. I had to put all my sewing stuff away last night because we are having people over tonight for a big open house. If you must now, I haven't finished any of the previous weeks either, although this week I came the closest to finishing thanks to the ease of the string piecing method.

Lessons learned:

• Don't be afraid to try new techniques
• Sometimes quick and inexact is good
• If you plan to do string piecing, you may need more fabrics than you think
• Don't throw out your old phone books!