Wednesday, March 7, 2012

String Quilts and Memories

String quilts are colorful, old-fashioned, easy, fun, and spectacular sometimes!  I make them when I want to do lots of sewing and no thinking.  It is the quilt block I always reccomend for beginners.  It is what I taught my students to make about the last 6 years that I taught.  I let them be the designer.  String quilts can take many forms depending on how the blocks are set together.
    One day at school as we were working on a quilt, a man came in the classroom who was there to work on the intercom system.  I imagine he was about 70 years old.  His face lit up when he saw what we were doing.  He said he knew exactly what we were making, because he made string quilts when he was a child.  He said he was one of 8 children.  His mother would gather the kids in a circle, give them pieces of newspaper for a foundation , and start handing out "strings" of fabric she had cut.  He said they could turn out a quilt top pretty quickly because there were so many of them!  He was delighted to see someone still doing it.

    Here are pictures of some of the string quilts I have made over the years.  Some are not very good quality pictures, but I have given these quilts away and this is the only documentation I have.

2 comments:

  1. I want to learn how to make these!!!

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  2. I love them all! Thank you for sharing!
    P.S. I found your blog via a search for brown quilts and boy, yours is lovely. :) Thanks again.

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