MacThayer

I just made a string pieced quilt out of scraps, and it turned out beautiful! I took 10" square pieces of muslin and foundation pieced the strips onto the foundation. That gives it stability because you're going to be piecing with all kinds of bias, and you won't be able to remember if you cut the strip on the cross grain, straight grain or bias. When done with my blocks, I trimmed them to exactly 10", and started piecing them together. There was a bit of moving blocks around to get a better color distribution, but not a lot. I put a relatively plain print border on it -- mostly for color and because it "popped" a lot of colors in the quilt; it was a dark rose-pink with just a bit of geometric patterning. I thought I would have trouble quilting it because of the extra layer of muslin (plus top, batting and backing) but I had no trouble at all. I used rounded motifs in the quilting and a color that "stood out" for the quilting, to counter all the square blocks. I gave it to my niece for a graduation present, and now it's her "favorite thing", as she tells me. Oh, and the binding was scrappy - so easy to sew together 2 1/2" strips together to make a binding. I was so pleased with the results! I don't have a photo, but you could just google "string quilts" for lots of ideas.