Strings and things

I had a few questions about the size of my room so for anyone else that may be curious, it’s 14.5 feet long by 10 feet wide, not counting the closet.

The quilt frame takes just over 10 feet of that length and about 4 feet of the width when it’s rolled close to the wall – so it consumes a large portion of the room. Several years ago I had my first long arm in our (non air conditioned) garage. I’m happy to give up floor space to be able to quilt inside the house!

I posted this link to the YouTube video tour of my sewing room yesterday. Hopefully, these still photos will give you a much better idea of the size. In the first picture I’m standing in front of the closet. The second one was taken at the opposite end of the room in front of the widow.

Yes, it can be tight at times, but it works well if I keep things organized. That’s the easy part.

The real challenge is managing tasks so I don’t have too many projects going on at the same time. I also need to get better at using leftover scraps regularly so they don’t get out of control and spill out of their designated space.

Yesterday, I put in an order online to have some inspiration photos I’d saved printed at Walgreens. They’re having a 50% off prints sale until Saturday, August 23rd and the same day pickup is convenient. If you missed this one, they have their photo printing sales pretty regularly so the next opportunity to get them at half price won’t be much of a wait.

I use these albums from Amazon to store them.

This morning I woke up, did some laundry and vacuuming, then sat on the couch to organize my scraps from the last few weeks.

They’re all sorted now and put away. It always feels great having that out of the way and makes me wonder why I procrastinate doing it. 🙂

Stuffing the pieces into full little drawers was yet another reminder “I need to use this stuff up!!”. So I started cutting paper foundations to do just that.

I’ve tried fabric foundations but they do add a lot of extra weight to the quilt that we really don’t need here in south Florida.

The Publix grocery store ads I like to use are printed on 10.5″ by 11″ newsprint paper. It’s a good size and easier to remove later than regular printer paper.

I used my a rotary cutter, designated for paper only, and trimmed a set of 12 pages to 10.5″ squares.

I’m plan to continuously make blocks until I have as many empty little string drawers as possible. I won’t be able to set them all into quilt tops as I go but once the blocks are all made, I’ll do a marathon top making session.

There were two drawers of patriotic strings so that’s where I need to begin. I plan to work on block sets for specific ideas on how to set them. This first group will be set with sashing, cornerstones, and a border.

I’ll admit.. I am curious to see how many blocks one of these full drawers of strings generates. Care to guess?