Continuous Strip Quilt

All that red and brown must've gotten to me, I took a sharp turn last weekend and pulled fabric from the two and a half inch strip bin; blue, green, purple, jade, teal, etc. It was great! I wanted to make Finn's Continuous Strip quilt (no link) and I wanted fast, no-thinkum sewing.

The bin before

The bin after

The color palette

The pile of strips was actually three times that size because I wanted my quilt to be 45" x 66", so I pieced 42 yards.

This is how I sewed the strips together, quick, on the diagonal. Lay them RST forming a reversed 'L'.

Bring the right hand corner down until it touches the opposite edge, crease with your thumbnail.

Open it up and use the crease as your stitching guide. Continue pulling strips from your pile and sewing them to the continuous strip. I found I preferred to work with strips that were 22" or shorter, I figure the more variety the better! I didn't measure as I went along, but stopped and measured about every half hour, so that I was getting up to move around too. I found I pieced on average 10 yards every thirty minutes, cool!

Trim all.

And I actually threw these away. It was so freeing, I can't tell you. :) I rationalized, if I stitched them again, they wouldn't make good HST's because the contrast would be too low.

Press open.

Next fold the strip in half RST and sew along one long side. Cut the bottom apart and press open, fold in half again and sew along the long side, and do this again and again. It's sooo fun! Everytime I opened it to press, I was delighted by the color play.

Here it is at 16 strips - or 32". Lila came to inspect my work.

On the next row, it turned the vertical into the horizontal. I love it! I didn't know it was going to do that, but I really like it. I was ready to do another one with a different set of strips to see what it would look like!

Close-up

Machine quilted

This took me a Sat/Sun to sew and 2-3 hours to machine quilt on my Janome. REALLY fast for me. I was so psyched!