Thursday

Sweet Sundays - String Quilt

My church group, known as the Sweet Sundays Quilters get together every other Wednesday to make quilts.  I love the involvement of the non-sewers when it comes to these projects.  They are eager and enthusiastic to help and they get very little credit for all the work they do.

When the group started, it was all because of a box of fabric that has been sitting at the church for years.  No one seemed to know where it came from or why it was there, but it was there.  So the ladies got together and sorted the box of fabrics into four categories; manly fabrics, feminine fabrics, kids fabrics and solids. From there we started to make things.  Some of the fabrics were mere scraps but we kept them. The leader of our group (who has skills as a sewing instructor) got the ladies to cut the kids scraps into 3-inch strips.  She told us it didn't matter how long the pieces were (but obviously the longer the better), just cut the strips.

While the non-sewing ladies cut the strips, I stitched them together end-to end, like a mile-long string of a 3-inch strip making sure no two fabric designs were next to each other.  After they were sewed end-to end, I cut the strips into 50-inch sections the proceeded to sew those strips together.  The funny thing about the strips was that none of them matched by theme or even by color in some instances.  I worried about the outcome.

At first, I thought this was going to be tedious but I stitched the rows together 2 at a time then joined the sections together after that.  It made me feel like I was making real progress sewing the sections together.  By the time I was done, it felt a little like there was as much thread in this quilt as fabric!

In the end, I think the consistency in the primary colors made up for the lack of common themes in the designs.  The finished project looks great.  I learned a lot about pre-conceived notions regarding color, theme and design by just trusting the process.

Now it goes up for auction and I hope whoever owns it likes it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

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