This goes on my bed.

My local guild, the Miami Co. Quilters Guild, has an annual Drag n' Brag show the end of Sept (always the last full weekend on Sat. & Sunday at Paola, KS Middle School). We have a UFO Challenge--for those of you that don't quilt, that means a quilt that has been in progress much longer than needed! (UnFinished Object type project). I have been hanging onto my "strings" from all the quilts in the 7 yrs since I started quilting. My beginning teacher, Nada Thoden, said to save them for a string quilt--so I did. The bags have been growing in the corner of my sewing room now since 2010 to the point that I could not reach my Accuquilt cutting machine--so it was time to tackle those strings.

In quilting lingo strings are really strips of fabric ranging from 1" to about 3" or more. I first sorted my bags of strings into brights, neutrals (white, black,natural), darks, and pastels/lights. Once I had 4 piles I stashed the neutrals, darks and lights for use later. Since I had many yards of black from my KCRQF Display Challenge "mishap" and some black wideback, I decided I wanted a bright and black quilt. I started stitching strings together in 10" widths. Now most quilters use a foundation for those strings--paper, muslim,reject fabric, even coffee filters or used dryer sheets! But I've used no foundation in the past with good results so skipped that part again knowing I'd be doing some medium to heavy quilting to keep everything from shifting. I then cut both the string sets and the black into 10" squares and made half sq. triangles. I wanted a diagonal placement so that I could use that long black stripe to practice my Tia Curtis Welsh Borders class. Doing her Welsh borders (ruler work alert) on the diagonal was more difficult and while working on this I kept asking myself why I was going diagonal! But I do like the huge number of variations you can do to dress the arcs from her ruler set.

After getting the strings quilted with wild feathers (a'la Angela Walters) using a Marathon thread #50 trilobal in a gold, we decided due to some rain seepage, to pull all the carpet in our 17x26' basement where I quilt. That meant covering all quilting stuff and then shoving all the furniture around. We've decided we are too dang old for this work! Our efforts to find a couple of high schoolers to pull carpet were for naught--so we spent 2 days ripping! (and twice that recuperating!)

Once we got down to bare concrete, I did a thorough cleaning and jumped back onto the Gammill to finish the quilt. All the black Welsh border design was done with SoFine #50.

P.S. the Hubs is worried he'll not be able to fall asleep under this wild quilt---like that's ever been an issue!