Blue String Quilt

I don’t know if I’ve showed you this finished quilt, or not?

If I have, I’m sorry.  Enjoy the recap!

I made this quilt when I realised I had way too many blues in the stash.  I also realised I hadn’t made a blue/white quilt ever, despite the blue/white quilts being amongst my favourites.

I’d seen somewhere online the tutorial for the string quilt and I went at it with gusto.  This baby is huge!  It totally wrecked my sewing machine, incidentally.  I’m not blaming the quilt itself, but my machine really didn’t like sewing these blocks and I had to get major surgery done on her.

So I made a million of these blocks, and about half way through thought ‘This is actually boring me rigid’.  But I kept going and finished her off.  I vowed never to make another string quilt again.

Then Orca Bay by Bonnie Hunter was released, and half way through making that I realised she had included the string blocks in her quilt and I was committed to make four million more.

I love the way you can use just about every sort of fabric in scrap quilts.  This truly hideous frog fabric has been in my stash forever, and it’s gone, gone, gone now.

Will I ever make another one?  I don’t know.  Probably not.  I love the fact that it’s a quilt as you go design.  But the stitching down of the white sashings really hurt my hands.  It’s a lot to handle.  And as I have my own personal long arm quilter who does it for a kiss and a hug (my mum), I’m fairly sure I won’t be rushing again.

How was your New Year’s Eve?  Mine was quiet – early night home from a birthday party and then celebrated the coming of the New Year by watching a cultural classic movie – Can’t Stop The Music by the Village People.

It was a truly awful movie, but truly fabulous also. 

Hope your 2014 is a fantastic one.  See you soon!