Busy Hands Quilts: Scrappy String Quilt in Thimbleberries

I sold a quilt like this awhile back, and the buyer asked me to make another one to give her mother. I finally have it done! The fabrics are all Thimbleberries except the blacks which are a mix of quilt-shop fabrics to fill in.

Usually I freehand quilt in cream thread on Thimbleberries fabrics, but I figured black would be better since the border is black.

The blocks are foundation pieced on white muslin. I drew a line 3/4" from the center of the block as a guide for placement of the center black strip. Other strips were added at random after this. Without a printed foundation piece, the strips do not line up when joined with the other blocks, but that is the beauty of this strip quilt - the look of using up old scraps.

Here is the pile of blocks. The requested quilt uses only 16 blocks, but I do not know how to make so few blocks at a time, so I made over 50. I am the type who jumps into things with both feet and often end up overdoing it and burning myself out. Quilting is no exception. Why make 16 when I could make 50+...? Weird, I know. It took me a lot longer to have this quilt ready for my customer, but guess what? I have blocks to assemble two more quilts all ready to go!!

Ready to trim the blocks to size. I am learning that the foundation piece can become misshapen during the sewing process, so they ended up 1/4" smaller than anticipated. And of course a fabric foundation is not removable and adds to the thickness of the top. I found these 10" paper piecing squares at Missouri Star Quilt this week and plan to try them out. They have a video on YouTube on how to use these papers, and she didn't mention them changing shape or sizes when sewing. And they tear off so nicely! Plus, they are super duper cheap compared to using fabric, even cheap muslin. I can't bring myself to use an old phone book and get my hands dirty!

Here is a finished 6-1/4" block. I made a nice dent in my scrap pile with these blocks, yeah!!