The last month I have been trying to finish these blocks before the October 15 swapping deadline.
The #Twilter! group on Facebook (email scientificquilter@gmail.com if you want an invite) was doing a swap of a free block.
We chose to swap “wonky hashtag” blocks available on Craftsy from their 2012 free block of the month for January.
Carole is taking charge of handling the swapping in & out and the blocks will come back in November.
Due to a recent reorganization of my sewing room, I have still been focused on sewing scraps together. I can thoroughly say that the 2nd half of 2015 was a scrappy quilting month for me.
I had a baggie of strings that I had been sorely neglecting. Just prior to the block swap announcement, I started arranging and sewing strings together to create “fabric”.
Lots of varying bright (mostly) colors that are the unmeasured strips between 1.5 & 0.75 inches strips that are usually the leftover after cutting other scraps.
These seemed to make the perfect happy fun pieces that would go into the hashtag blocks.
So the wonky hashtag blocks has no rules for what angles are sewn into the blocks, we take a 12.5 inch block, slice it up any angle the first direction.
Then sew strips into it. Here is the first 2 strips of strings sewn into my blocks.
At this point I was wanting to preview the design to see if it would work.
And then this gets pressed, and then cut at 2 more random angles, going the other direction.
I honestly found the 3rd and 4th cut of this block easier in the fact that I didn’t have to make a decision on how to angle the strips. I had to try to chose (sometimes didn’t work) the widest pieces of fabric to cut through so the seams wouldn’t become a huge problem on the 2nd direction.
I have to admit, I lost a few fabrics on one side or the other of the seam, just due to the symmetry of the whole thing and trying to find the best option didn’t always mean there was a “good” option, if you get what I mean.
The nice thing about this is that I overestimated the length of string strip I needed, so I was able to create more string blocks with the leftover pieces from the original cuts.
This gave me enough string blocks to eventually make 16 blocks.
I did have one “mess up” block that I sewed the wrong fabric side of the white on white AND I sewed the bias edge to the outside.
I am keeping this block so I will have 17 total from this project.
I realize besides my mess up block I won’t have any string strip blocks because everyone else is just making regular fabric strips to go in the center of the hashtags.
But I thought of a creative way to do sashing that incorporates more strings. I need to make wonky sashing that mimics the tilted hashtags of the quilt, also creating mini cornerstone blocks of sashing as well.
A preview of it below, not to correct scale or colorful proportions:
And yes, this concludes yet another version of the “Darla goes overboard” portion of my quilting life. I am really happy with these blocks, and am amazed at the positive responses already to the blocks that I posted online already.
I have, however, hit another mini-burnout for quilting due to this project. Don’t worry, I’ll be back at it shortly. I am going to try to take some pictures of the other quilts I have in progress on the floor. I also am starting to take inventory on what I am going to bring to the retreat next month.
I am thinking of collecting strings from the other quilters in the retreat group and working on strings to go in the sashing of the hashtag quilt. Till we talk again, hopefully soon!
