Yum yum yum, a fabric surprise

Aren’t surprises just the best? An amazing thing happened in the making of this quilt. I was sorting through some empty boxes in our storeroom here at the Homespun offices while doing a big mail out of competition prizes and I found a pile of fabric strips at the bottom of one of the ‘empty’ boxes.

It was the strangest thing – I couldn’t find anyone to claim the fabric strips and yet they definitely looked like they had been cut up ready for a quilt. Or maybe they were just ready to be made into sample cards?

Certainly they were almost all different fabrics so that would make sense. Incredibly, though, I couldn’t have put a better combination together myself. I loved everything about these fabrics – the colours somehow all worked beautifully together, even though they were very different styles and patterns and definitely weren’t just from the same range.

So I figured, if no one else wanted to claim them, I would set myself the challenge of making something out of them. And boy do I love a challenge! Not the big huge scary kind of challenges that can take over your life, but small-scale, fun opportunities that challenge your resourcefulness and creativity. So I set myself some rules.

The fabric was already cut into random strips. So I was not allowed to cut the fabrics at all, I had to use them exactly as I had been given them. I wasn’t allowed to buy anything else to make this quilt, I could only use what I already had in my stash. I didn’t want to mess up the brilliant combination of fabrics that my surprise find had already given me, so the only fabric I added to this quilt was some natural-coloured linen from one of my favourite stores, IKEA. I absolutely love this linen and always have loads of it on hand to use around my house. It was the perfect accent for backing, binding and also using in amongst the other patchwork cottons.

So I just laid out all the strips according to length, and sorted them according to ‘horizontal length’ or ‘vertical length’. I just kept sewing the long strips together and sewing the short strips together until I had two panels which I then just sewed together (no cutting was allowed, remember).

Christine Book (pictured) calls this idea ‘spontaneous string piecing’ and she’s teaching us all about it in her fantastic DVD that will come attached to the November issue of Homespun, so be sure to keep your eye out for it next month.

Now I’m no Christine Book, but it just goes to prove that anybody can have a go at string piecing and get some fantastic results. I just added some really fluffy batting, quickly dropped on the binding and my little snuggly lap quilt was finished in a weekend! Thanks to a great selection of fabrics that I never could have come up with myself, I really think this quilt has a wonderfully vintage, scrappy look to it – particularly when coupled with my VERY amateur machine quilting!

Bianca Tzatzagos