The Brown Strip story

In the last few posts you have seen bits and pieces of the brown strip-pieced scrap quilt that I have been working on. Now it is time for…….(in your best Paul Harvey voice)……THE REST OF THE STORY!!

Back in September of 2018 I had rotator-cuff surgery on my right shoulder. I knew that I would probably have some time to sew but would be limited in what I could do so I wanted to work on a project that could be cut out and ready to go. I saw this design…..

….in the September 2018 issue of Modern Patchwork. Sadly this magazine went out of business just after I joined!!!

I was pretty sure that I would be able to push fabrics thru the sewing machine and would be able to iron with my small travel iron…..

So….I spent the week prior to surgery pulling out brown scraps and cutting them into 4.5 inch pieces.

After the surgery I was indeed able to do the piecing even though I had to make sure that my arm didn’t move too far out of the sling…..

But, when I put it up on the design wall…..

….it looked too dark and foreboding!!! It definitely needed something to lighten the color AND the mood.

At this point, I wasn’t able to use my arm to cut fabrics, so I had to put the project away.

Later, I went back to it and cut tons and tons of additional fabrics, adding MANY new colors…..

And then it was put away….to become a dreaded UFO for about 18 months!!!

I had planned to work on it at our May Guild Retreat which, of course, was cancelled!! 😞

But this summer has proven to be the perfect time to get back to it. It was something that I could sew on happily without having to do much planning or thinking about it. It was one of those projects that didn’t take up too much of my brain!!!

For some reason, in the original planning I had decided that I needed 80 blocks and that the quilt would be 8 x 10. Bu that would have been much larger than the Lap quilt that I was going for. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until AFTER I had made over 75 of the blocks!!!

With all of the brown strips made, it was time to think about the corners. In the original pattern the author had use crumb piecing to create the corner triangles. I was NOT interested in that!!!

I made one block using just one background fabric…..

….but it looked pretty plain. So, I was going to have to find something else to bring some sparkle to the blocks.

I decided to create strip sets and cut the triangles out so that there is modified courthouse step look to it.

I would love to say that my process was super accurate but the truth is that I cut everything bigger and just cut the block down to size at the end. I used my 12.5 inch ruler to cut the corners, marking the line with painter’s tape…..

The brown strip sets were cut down to 4.25 inches in width and a triangle was sewn to each side. After a few calculations, I marked my square ruler to show where it should like up against the stripe (the 2nd blue tape)…..

After making this first cut, I used the rule to square up the block to 8.5 inches.

As I started laying these out, I was super excited to see the sparkle that was appearing in the triangle areas….

All of the squares were sewn together…..

….and this quilt was off to a good start.

But what about borders…… more to come!!