Fish Strings and HST's

Heartstrings Fishy, anyone? I was thinking the one with the heart wouldn't be too good for a guy, so here's a fishy one:


Now I know that green isn't one of the 'official colors' for the centers of the blocks, but they also say in the guidelines that if you make a whole top, not just blocks to send in, that you can use any string pattern you wish. Anyone got lots of blue and green strings to sew with?

And I haven't only been playing on EQ lately designing headers and string block layouts, I've also been sewing up a storm. Unfortunately, while I've been very productive, there's not much to show:


These are 204 half square triangles, waiting to be ironed. Over there to the left are 8 pages of 8 more hst's waiting to be cut into triangular bits, get their dog ears trimmed, and be pulled off the paper. And yes, those of you with sharp eyes can see that I'm arranging all my finished hst's on a cookie sheet... lol

No, I'm not planning on baking them, I just have to be able to move them to a place where kitty midnight-rampaging/racing can't send my neat little fabric-sorted piles flying. Do any of your cats wake up from a sound sleep then suddenly tear off on a cat version of invisible ghost-chasing?

Bunches and bunches of these 4½ inch blocks yet to go, hundreds. These will be part of 36 depression blocks, for a king size quilt, so I'll be plugging away for a while, sewing hsts in my sleep... till I get 576 of them done. :) I don't want to start sewing any of the hst blocks together until I get over 16 different blue fabrics I'll be using, so I can mix them all up in each block.

Another Heartstrings design

I'd chatted via e-mail to a couple of you about a slightly different versions of the heartstrings heart design - this time with the diagonal blue lines rotated so they'd radiate out from the red heart. Don't know if I like this one better than the other one or not. :)

The single heart, with pastel strings, that I used in this month's header would make a cute quilt too, if you have a lot of pastel strings.



As always, if you want to copy either of these designs for a heartstrings quilt, feel free.

Anti-Depression blocks

I was making the two Blocks-of-the-Month due for my guild meeting and got interrupted when I was about to start sewing the last two halves together. When I came back to my machine, I saw this. Wouldn't that make a cool border idea? I like pieced borders, and this one would make good use of all those scraps. :)

Then, of course, I went on and attached the top half of those blocks to the bottom half, and got these two depression blocks:

Heartstrings Logo and Link

I made a small logo of a heart made with heartstrings blocks, did some talking with Mary J., and after getting her blessing, I stuck it over in my sidebar, linked to the Heartstrings Quilt Project website. Here's a big 400 pixel wide version of it:


If anyone else making these blocks wants the code for the little 125 pixel logo and link, just e-mail me and I'll send it to you, all ready to paste in your sidebar. :)

I'm not a member of the Heartstrings yahoo group, but I have already made... *counting on my fingers* ...nine complete ones, I think, and will be making many more blocks. I'll be sending some of them off and using others here with my guild on our local charity quilt project.

In fact, I'm going to make it our block of the month for two months running, (red stripe vs. blue stripe) so hopefully our guild will get several quilts done. I'm a fabric shred hoarder, and I'm ashamed to admit that there's not a noticeable dent in my strips and strings stash yet, so this is a GOOD project for me to be working on!

Heartstring blocks

Well, just like I heard, these string blocks ARE addictive! One blue middle, and 5 red middles, all done in an evening. And not only fast, but easy too. Here's the first ones I've done, another 6 on the way. I plan to mail a couple off to Texas, then I think I'm going to try to do it as block-of-the-month with my guild, we have several charities we give quilts to.


And of course, Toby had to check out what I was doing with fabric on the floor. I was able to distract him with a ping pong ball I found under the couch so I could get the cat-free picture above. He can play pretty good soccer with the ping pong ball, but the game is over if he bats it too close to the couch.

Ostrich Round Two done

Well, here it is, hung up on my fireplace mantel, with my collection of brass cats holding the upper edge. Looks a lot like the plan I drew up in EQ, doesn't it?


People have been asking if I paper pieced it, well, some of it was. The center compass and the teal/white kaleidoscope blocks were paper pieced. The middle round of log cabin pineapple blossom blocks were not paper pieced, and neither were the green/white connector blobs between the kaleidoscope blocks. I'll spend tonight picking out the paper from underneath them, uggh. It would have been easier to do it before I attached it between the borders, but with all the bias edges, it was less stretchy to leave the paper on every other block till it was attached.

If I'd scanned in my exact fabric, it'd look closer to the EQ drawing - all of the fabrics I used were already in EQ's palette. The only one that was really too dark was that marbled teal I used.

White setting triangles are next, to put the whole thing on point, so I cropped and rotated the picture so you don't have to tilt your head. *grins*

Where I'm Going

Several of you asked where I'm going with the kaleidoscope and connector blocks, so here'e the EQ version of it:



I've only got seven of these blocks left to make, then I'll attach it. The final size, including that outer marbled teal 2 inch border, will be 40 inches square. I'm thinking, after this round might be a good time to set it on point, so tilt your heads to see where it might be going... I'm thinking 4 big white triangles maybe? And (correct me if I'm wrong) but I think putting 4 big triangles on this will take the size of the quilt to 60 inches square. I'm going to need a lot more if it's going to be king size. :)

Back to work on my Ostrich

Well, the deadline for the next round for those of us who're doing the Ostrich over at Peach Quilting is fast approaching! I agonized over this round, we had a two color limit, and I kept finding blocks that would look good in three or four of my colors. I'm not doing this one scrappy, I've picked white, two shades and a marbled shade of each color.

I went back and forth between Quilter's Cache and Blockbase (by EQ) and spent an afternoon going thru all the blocks that might look good in ONLY two colors. Here's the two I finally picked and started on:



I'll be connecting the kaleidoscope/windmill type blocks with the ones on the right. All the blocks will finish at 4 inches. I'm done with the connecting blocks, except for trimming them, and I have another 6 of the dark centered and 7 of the light centered kaleidoscopes to do. Paper piecing blocks always takes me longer. :(

Anyway, when I'm done with all 32 blocks, they'll go around this center and first round that I made for the ostrich challenge.