Ode to volumes

Happy Monday and welcome to my purse sewing turned garment sewing turned quilting blog. Ha! That just shows you the sewing journey I've been on over the past 2 years since I started this blog. If you are not a quilter, rest assured that I will eventually return to garment sewing, but for now you will have to indulge me while I get this quilting bug out of my system.


So here is my latest quilt. To the best of my knowledge, this quilt is representative of a string quilt except that string quilts are often paper/foundation-pieced and this type is not usually. Now, as you all know, I'm a newbie quilter and by no means an expert on anything quilty, so I could be entirely mistaken. But I've searched and searched and aside from just stacks of strips, this style of quilt is a string quilt. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, that I have been drawn to this simple free-spirited style for quite some time and I thought it was time to tackle one of my own.


This quilt design, if you can call it that, is one of my own. I liked the stacked 'string' look but didn't want to go any further and cut the strips as you might do for a blocked string quilt. I wanted 3 stacks of strips with solid in between the stacks and I'm calling this my 'ode to volumes' quilt because it was inspired by Anna Maria Horner's volumes fabric which I adore and have used before.


The solid coordinate was Kona in Herb and the patterned fabric was a mixture of different blues and aquas that compliment my living room and include, Jessica Levitt's Timber, Amy Butler's daisy chain, Denyse Schmidt's Hope Valley, and a variety of other coordinating fabrics.

The stacked strips actually repeat once in each 'pile' and therefore the quilt was sewn in 6 sections or very large blocks. The whole thing was bound in Amy's butlers daisy bouquet in forest and I used the Kona Herb on the back with some leftover strips thrown in to widen the backing.

(sorry about all the horrible lighting, it's raining in Oregon, again, and if I have to wait for a sunny day, I'm going to be waiting a long time)

I'm really happy with the result and I have enough Timber fabric left over to create something else... what to do? I guess I'll come up with something.

While I was researching what to call this design, I found quite a few lovely examples of this type of quilt, but no representative flickr group. I'm an organization junkie, so I decided this 'category' of quilts needed a group to call it's own. So we now have the Stacked Strip quilts flickr group. This is a public flickr group to which anyone can contribute. If you have or know of a picture that belongs in this pool, please add it. It's in the sidebar too, so you can find it at any time.

Happy Sewing!