Strings!

My string bin is overflowing! 

For the past eight years, one of the quilt guilds that I belong to sponsors a retreat.  I teach classes Friday night, Saturday and Sunday.  It's a whole lot of fun!  The theme for my classes this year was SCRAPS.  I've been doing a lot of scrap quilting lately.  It amazes me what I can make out of bits of leftover fabric.  My Friday class was on organizing your scraps.  Sunday's class was on putting them to use.  Saturday's class was on Selvage quilts. 

As the ladies were cutting their scraps, several of them left me their strings.  Others made their way into my room.  I brought my AccuQuilt Go! Cutter and let everyone try it.  More strings!  My string bin was overflowing when I left home.  It still is!  I took a little down time today and pieced these three blocks.  I only had three foundations marked or I probably would have made more.  I had 20 blocks or so already made, so these will be added to those.  And I marked the rest of the foundations, so I'm ready for more string blocks when the mood strikes me.  I found that I have a lot of short strings.  And narrow ones.  I think I will have to look up a pattern that puts those short strings to good use.  The Phonebook Quilt I taught last year was great.  I'm thinking maybe a Spiderweb block.  I'm not sure when this will get into the quilting agenda though.  Perhaps I'll just start a new string bin for now.

Here are a few photos from the retreat.  I showed several scrap quilts. Here they are layed out on the table for a "bed turning".  The top quilt is one of my selvage quilts.  You can see my pink selvage quilt in process in the center of the picture.  This is probably the layout that I will use.

This is the table set up in the auditorium.  We tried some different things and I think it worked much better.  Most importantly, I have some ideas for next year that I think will work out very nicely.

My pink selvage quilt in the works.  One of the ladies rearranged it to this layout.

Here are a few of the ladies.  We had about 42 people there.  Several didn't get in the picture.  Some had already left.  I'm in the first row, second from the left.  I'm wearing a tee shirt that says "Got Scraps?"