String Quilt WIP

I was reading through some old blog posts from Ashley at Film in the Fridge when I happened upon this one and fell in love.

How bright and colorful, and right up my alley!

Except I don't quite have the stash that she does, I'm slowly building that up. While I have a TON of scraps, I just didn't have much variety.

But I did have this

I bought it without having any plan for it, I just knew I had to have it! 

My first thought for it was a bento box following this tutorial. She used It's a Hoot and I love it! But I was talking to a friend about it and she thought it was too busy. While I agreed that it was a bit busy I still wanted to proceed. But I put it off.

Then I decided that the Lollipop layer cake I had would be awesome as a bento box, so I made that one into one. I know, what does that have to do with anything? Give me a sec, I'm getting there.

While I was arranging the Lollipop blocks onto my design wall, I had a small strip of white showing in between them and thought, hey, what if I did one with the It's a Hoot layer cake after all and just put a teeny strip of sashing in between them? Wouldn't that break up the busyness?

Insert happening upon Ashley's blog post here and problem solved! I'll just do a string quilt like hers!

So I got out my layer cake and separated the prints.

I removed the ones that were so large I would lose the print by cutting them into strips. I have them put aside to use somewhere else. 

Then I separated the piles again. One of them was larger scale prints. I cut those into 2.5" strips.

The last pile was everything else. I split that one into two more piles. I wanted to get as many different sizes in all of the different prints and colors that I could, so I tried to make sure there was a good sampling in the two different piles. Then I cut them into random sized strips, varying from 1.5" to 2.5". I had a plan of course before I started cutting to make sure I got full use of each 10" piece.

So now I have piles of strips

And a few blocks completed.

These are a bit tedious to put together so I'm taking it slow and just sewing a couple at a time. I'm really loving how it's turning out so far!

And here is a sneak peek of a project I just finished. 

I was chain sewing and I ended up with this at one point. I thought it was really cool looking so I snapped a pic. I'll show the finished product soon, it's on it's way to it's new owner and I can't reveal it until she receives it. Just know that Bree has demanded a tutorial, so there will be a full workup!