I had packed up some boxes for myself back in 2021 when I was in the USA to help my mom. They were never sent to me.

I added one more box when I was there in February and March. Included was that blue and yellow quilt for a Ukrainian family.

These boxes were full - mostly all fabric, tops and that one Ukrainian colors quilt.

Back in 2021 I helped Rachael by trimming a lot of Kaffe fabrics and making up some 2.5” strip sets for this quilt. We are selling this kit shown on the right - and I wanted to make up collections of fabric that could be used. So, I went to the shop and cleared out some of the bolts that were almost finished up and cut off strips from them for these packs.

But of course, naturally, I had to sometimes straighten up edges and such when doing this. No, I didn’t use the Accuquilt cutter. Maybe I should have. But I didn’t.

I kept all those cut offs and they were in one of the boxes that just arrived. (I mailed two of these boxes in March, 2023, that I had prepared back in 2021 plus one with newly prepared things - all shipped around March 10 to myself).

Here is the bag of what I’m talking about.

Most of these are small - only that one piece was what I considered a larger piece (about a yard). The rest varied from 2” - about 3/4” wide.

So I decided I was going to make up some “made fabric” from all these tiny pieces. The thing that was nice about them was that they were long. For the most part.

They are funny. They look like they could make a nice skirt - with built in curves for the hips.

My “made fabric” from these tiny strips.

My next question was, “What am I going to make with this made fabric”?

I decided to cut this made fabric into 6” squares so that I could hopefully end up with some 5” (finished in the quilt) half square triangles (HST).

After the first cutting, I have 41 - 6” squares. After the original cutting, I had a bunch of small pieces that I continued to sew together to make more blocks.

I ended up with all of these blocks - both string and crumb or string/crumb combo blocks.

For this quilt, however, I only used string blocks.

I have various choices as to what to do with these things - but it does make me go back to my strings projects. I am not totally thrilled with most strings quilts. Oh they are ok - but nothing that make me say, “I must do that.”

Been there. Done that.

Just to remind you - the strings projects that I’ve made look like the ones shown below: I spent weekly blog posts telling you how to make these.

Click on the arrows to go to the next one.

But I did end up liking the ones I made - well, that red and black one is the one I like the least. But the rest - are fine.

I knew that whatever I made with these - it would be small. I wasn’t going to combine Kaffe with other fabrics - and I wanted this one to stay a blue and purple and green quilt. And this is all that I had from those strings of the Kaffe leftovers.

So…which one? It really fell to Classic Strings, Stringy Zigzag or Stringles.

Hmm.

I’ve decided on this layout. It took me days to decide on it. I actually agonized over it! I probably had about 20 different layouts I considered.

So here is the layout I finally decided on.

The purple that I used is a lavender and more of the color shown here - not like a lot of the photos. I’m not sure why some of the ones downstairs in the living room show the color as more pink than it should be. My son told me that purple is hard to photograph.

Here is the top.

I did also bring over a yard or so of that outer border - it’s a Philip Jacobs print which is also part of the Kaffe Fassett collection.

Many of these pieces are quite small.

This is the actual color of the lavender. Final size - 53”x73”.

These blocks are 5” finished - and I made 96 of them - as I ended up making 48 of those strings blocks. Well, 49 as I cut too many in one direction and had to make one more to make it all work out right. Oops.

I had to stop at the ones I made here as I didn’t have enough for a whole other row of blocks. IOW, it wouldn’t help to make 5 more blocks, I would have needed enough to make a whole other row or a full 6 blocks which in turn would make 12 HST (half square triangles) by adding the purple to them.

In order to keep all of the strings going straight up and down, I did have to make 2 different blocks - but all it involved was sewing in different directions - like this. I made half going one way and half the other. Otherwise, I would have had some of the strings going perpendicular. My sis and I decided we liked it best with the strings going all up and down the quilt.

This is one of my piles of blocks. The other pile, which I apparently forgot to take a photo of, had the sewing line going the other direction. Sorry about that. But in the photo shown above this last photo, you could see that I need to make some going both directions. Because I am so bad at imagining things without some visual help, I needed to lay it out on the table to check out exactly what I needed!

Anyway, this quilt is a lap size quilt- and then I ran out of strings that were big enough to even use. I’m considering doing something like this with them

or

or I might just throw them in the kindling! I guess we’ll see how motivated I am.

I still have some leftovers of those string pieces I sewed together and may make some scrappy 2.5” squares out of them. I’ll not throw them in the kindling. :)

Anyway, thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

And note - I may be all over the place with the tenses in this blog post. I’m sorry. I started writing it as I worked on these strips - from the time I was thinking about what I wanted to do right up until today - the day this post is going live. So, sometimes I was in the present tense and sometimes, past and sometimes something else such as present perfect. I tried to clean it up but may have missed some of the issues. If you see this issue - that is why.

Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store here!

Feel free to browse the site.

Boxes arrived - Kaffe scraps included!