Wednesday, July 8, 2015

A Few Thoughts on Strips

I love working with strips. I love the mindless, meditative effects of running the fabric through the machine. Strip piecing (at least for me) is a perfect project when I'm quilting with friends. You will definitely notice a large number of strip pieced quilts in my blog.

Years ago, I belonged to an Internet quilt group called InterQuilt and I participated in a monthly strip swap for 2" strips. I used some of these strips to make a purple rail fence quilt for Jill, who is my niece Rachel's cousin. I realized that I don't have a picture of that quilt so I will have to reach out to Jill's Mom for one.
A view from inside the 2" strip box. A lot of oldies, but goodies in here.
Currently I'm working on two quilts made from 2.5" strips. You can see Strip Therapy here and here and you can see Radio Road here.

The strips I'm using came from swaps that I did with some of my quilting friends. A few (luckily, very few) of the strips are poorly cut. The over-sized strips are easy to trim and I've managed to finagle most of the undersized strips to work too. Some of the strips I received from our Black and White strip swap are black and cream, or black, white, and grey, but I'm going ahead and throwing them in my project anyways. A few non-batik strips snuck into the Batik strip swap. It's always interesting to work with other peoples' fabrics and see the variations, even though in theory they are all 100% quilt-shop quality cotton. Some of the fabrics are very thin, some are heavy, some of the prints appear dull, others are crisp and clear.
Here is LarryPug helping me to choose some fabric.
Thanks for visiting!

Pugs and kisses,
Nancy

4 comments:

  1. Thats what I like about strips too...kinda easy going sewing!

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  2. I like your helper. I never know which colors should go together. You have someone to choose for you. lol
    I see a couple of strips you have that I have, too. (We must be sisters!)
    Hugs

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  3. Thanks for the peak into your scrap box. I recognize some of those prints as I have them too but they aren't in my scrap box; they are in my stash. Yes, oldies but goodies. Too nice to throw out so I'll use them....eventually. Karen

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  4. I had that same experience with strip swaps. I had someone who hated a Hoffman Batik that I purchased and swapped because they thought it looked too much like a batik from JAF which was similar,but the material was much thinner.

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