Plaids in String Quilts-the Craftsy Project

Way back in 2012, Craftsy asked me to make a scrap quilt video. It sounded like a lot of fun. In early December, the three-person Craftsy crew flew from Denver to New Bern NC, rented a van, and drove down to Morehead City. I met them for supper and gave them directions to their beach house. When I was told the Craftsy was coming (just after Thanksgiving) I contacted a rental agency at the beach and made introductions so the Craftsy folks could stay at a nice beach house instead of a local motel. No offense, but the hospitality choices here then were 'thin on the ground.' We started filming the very next day at my studio in Morehead City and ran flat out for four days. 

One of the projects on the Craftsy video (renamed 'Scrap Quilting-Waste Not, Want Not' by Craftsy) was a small string quilt. I knew I wanted to use plaids in the quilt but not get hung up on matching lines horizontally or vertically. The perfect solution was to cut strips of red-and-white plaid on the diagonal. All of the projects in the video needed to be at "I'm making my first quilt-" stage. A string quilt, with blocks machine-sewn over the pages from an old phone book, would be ideal. In the final version, the quilt would be named 'The Phone Book Quilt.'

The red-and-white plaid is the center strip of each block. Half the block is dark (red) strips and the other half is light (pink) strips. The process of how-to is illustrated by 'step-outs' and the picture here is a snapshot of what I showed viewers how to do.

The blocks sewn on paper went together quickly and the twenty 8" square blocks were arranged in a 'streak 'o lightning' set. Then the borders sewn on and the quilt top completed during the screening. The machine quilting (by my friend Vicki Garner) and the Big Stitch hand quilting (me) happened in the weeks after.

Plaids are seen in both red and pink sections of the blocks and I even ended up choosing a rose-colored plaid for the binding. 

So sometimes the best fabric choice is not a print or even a solid--it's a plaid.

The class 'Waste Not, Want Not' is still available on the Craftsy platform. Just type 'scrap quilting' into the search bar and the class pops up. 

Because this blog comes out prior to Valentines Day (February 14) I'll include here two other red quilty things I made just for fun. 

Skinny Kitties was sold at a fund-raising auction for our local cat rescue project.

The sashiko-on-red is a sample of a stencil I designed for Quilting Creations. It combines several traditional sashiko patterns along with a heart-fetching bunny.

The stencil is #PCW113 on the Quilting Creations website.

Happy Valentines Day!