Carolina Blues

Carolina Blues quilt top

For a recent quilt guild meeting, we were told to bring a small quilt sandwich on which to practice hand quilting. To prepare something quick, I sat down one evening with a pile of fabric strings - those long skinny strips of fabric that get trimmed away at the end of a project - and started sewing them together. Then I started cutting the pieced strings into 10" squares. On a whim, I cut those squares into quarter triangles, and began experimenting with ways to put them back together.

I found that with two 10" squares cut into quarter triangles I could make two different blocks: one a set of nesting squares, above, the other a striated cross, below. My hand quilting, as it turns out, was abysmal. I'll be needing a lot of practice before I go public with that. I ripped out the offending stitches and finished this little trivet, pictured, on the machine.

string piles

In the meantime, I was intrigued by the design, and wanted to see what kind of optical effects would be created by piecing sets of matching and contrasting blocks together in a quilt.

In case you'd like to try it for yourself, I'll share the steps. It's a very easy way to use up odd pieces of fabric. While working with small strings can be time consuming, the actual piecing is a cinch. For those who are experimenting with improvisational quilting, this technique offers a great balance between improv and structure.

For the larger quilt, I thought green might be a bit overpowering, so I decided to work with blues. I live in North Carolina, and my household is divided between Duke and Carolina. So, naturally, the quilt would have to combine broody Duke blue with ebullient Carolina blue. To give definition to the design, I decided to alternate between dark and light strings. The dark strings I chose were shades and tones of blue violet, cerulean, blue, and turquoise. The light strings included pale blues, violets, aquas, and pinks as well as a variety of neutrals in gray, white, off-white, and tan.

In general, strings were between 1" and 2". I preferred the visual effect of narrower strings, but I felt that variety was also important. To reduce waste but leave a comfortable margin of error, I trimmed the strings to around 11" before piecing them. I then pieced them together along their long edges, always starting from the same end. This yields one end that is fairly even and one end that is irregular.

A string-runner?

For lack of a better term, I'll call the resulting stretch of pieced strings a "string-runner." In the process of making this quilt, I made some very long string-runners - ranging from 40" to 100" long. To keep the runner from taking over the table as it grew, I rolled it up like a sushi-mat to the left of my sewing machine.

10" square blocks

When the string runner seemed long enough (i.e., when my back hurt, my pile ran out, and/or I got sick of sewing strings together), I took it over to the ironing board and pressed all the seams in one direction. In my opinion, there are WAY too many seams to press them open at this stage. Later, when piecing the half-square triangles together, it is helpful to finger press the center seams open to reduce bulk at the points.

This looks nothing like grilled cheese, but my choice
of similes suggests that I might be hungry.

After pressing the string runner, I first cut the runner into 10" widths. Then I trim those into 10" square blocks. Next, I cut each block diagonally into fourths, like a grilled cheese sandwich. You can see in the picture on the left that the resulting quarters have two different patterns. If you were to arrange the triangles with the hypotenuse at the top, one pair would have horizontal stripes, and the other pair would have vertical stripes.

Working with two blocks at a time, I swapped out two opposing quarter triangles from one block for two opposing quarter triangles from the other block. This has the result of grouping all the horizontal stripes together in one block and all the vertical stripes together in the other block. After piecing four quarter square triangles together to make each block, as shown on the right, the resulting blocks, like the green ones above, share the same fabrics but have two different patterns.

The next step is to square the blocks. They should each form a 9" square. It's especially important to remove the little sticky-out triangle flags that form off the corners. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll know it when you see it! Trimming off the little sticky-out triangle flags (that's the technical terminology, right?) makes the piecing much easier.

This is the tricky block: lots of stretch along the edges

When it's time to piece blocks together into rows, beware: the blocks like the one on the left will want to stretch. The blocks like the one at the top of the picture on the right will not want to stretch. When you piece them to one another, extra care is needed to keep the rows lined up properly and ensure that your points match up from block to block.

There are all kinds of ways to play with these blocks and to let them play with one another. The arrangement I chose, featuring eight rows of nine blocks each, is pictured below and at the top of this post, in two views of the completed quilt top. (The math will tell you that I had nine blocks leftover, and these will probably turn into a mini-quilt).

The alternations of light and dark in the strip piecing allow the nested squares to recede and advance, creating movement and depth. The piecing also creates a diamond grid, allowing the eye to shift between focusing on diamonds, squares, and crosses in a playful optical puzzle.  

If you try out this technique, I hope you will share your creations. Sky's the limit.