EQ7 tutorial Tuesday- String Quilts

Recently I checked out the quilt book section at my local library and found several “new” ones that I hadn’t seen before.

One was a book about String quilts! Have you ever done string quilts?

I’ve done a few and they are quite fun! –either do the strips “planned” with the same width or colors, or have them be “un-planned” and sewn together very randomly.

If you search EQ blocks for “string” you’ll just get a few blocks.

the two purple ones are meant for borders.

You can easily enough make your own string quilt blocks though.

Star with a 9” block (or whatever size you want) and randomly draw crooked lines from side to side to fill up the block like this

and color it

add to sketchbook and also find a diamond in a square block and add that to the sketchbook

still working on the block, select block/ serendipity/merge at the top

and if you select the diamond block on the left and your string block on the right, you’ll get this!

add to sketchbook and add this block to a quilt layout to get this

you can easily flip or turn every other block by holding down ALT and selecting the turn or flip button on the right and then coloring the quilt any way you want

and after adding the border string blocks, it looks like this

You can just as easily go back to your original string block and add it to the center of the quilt and rotate every other one again, like this

If you were making this quilt, you can either just GO for it and sew strips together and then trim the block down to size later, or you can print out the FPP patterns thru EQ (works better if the block is 6” or smaller, depending on your margins)

But the whole point of string quilts are the randomness!

Using the star block, a quilt could look like this

String quilts are fun and a great way to use up scraps!

Have you ever tried some?

link up below if you have 🙂