String Blocks for Hurricane Michael

Yesterday, I made some early morning visits to a few other bloggers, reading and commenting on the works in progress. But a link up from Elana at That Fabric Feeling hit me more than any of the others:  
hers was a call for string blocks to make quilts for those affected by Hurricane Michael in Florida. 

This just seemed like the right project at the right time. I knew I had some orphan strips, and I always have scraps (who doesn't!), plus I wanted a sewing diversion.

Looking through the orphan strips gave me a chance to sort them by color, with green being the most dominate. Add in my scraps, plus some cotton broadcloth for a foundation (the big green chunk in the upper right corner), and off I went to sew.

In Elana's post, she suggested a lightweight foundation fabric versus paper. Personally, I find ripping out paper a big pain in the you-know-what! So, given that I have more colored cotton broadcloth than plain muslin stashed away, this was a perfect opportunity to use it. 

By the way, it's easy to tell if your fabric has polyester in it, as most inexpensive broadcloth's do. Hit that fabric with a hot iron, and then smell it. Polyester has a particular, distinct chemical smell - once you smell it, you'll know it. (For some funny reason, it's a smell one can find in your local Goodwill - lot's of polyester stuff dumped there.)

Anyway, cotton will not smell. Of course, you could do the burn test: take a few strings of the fabric in question, and in a safe, fireproof area, set a match to it. If the strings turn to ash, it's cotton. If they melt into a glob, it's polyester. Oh you've learned so much today!

So let's get back to those string blocks. After tacking down the first strip with acid-free glue, the next strip was sewn on, then pressed open.

More strips got added to fill the whole 11" square.

Then, from the backside, the block got trimmed to 10 1/2".

Notice how the corners are rather small pieces? They tended to want to fly up, but I stitched them into peaceful submission with an 1/8" from the edge line of stitching, just on one side, to keep things square when the blocks are joined together.

And because I still had plenty of strips left, I made 5 more blocks for a total of 6 to send off.

These are already in the mail, on their way to the UMW Quilting Group, to be assembled into a quilt. 

And that pile of scraps? Again, the before:

The after.

Still doesn't look like there's a dent in it, does it? It just always amazes me at how much a pile of scraps can produce!

Happy Quilting!