It's Julie's Fault!

This weekend was supposed to be devoted to a couple of quilts for a couple of kids. My three-year-old grandsons have made the move into big boy beds and of course Grandmom is making them quilts. The plan is to have them for Christmas. The quilt for Eli is complicated, involving considerable handwork and a rather intricate lay-out that looks good on paper . . . . Nate's quilt is being assembled from a set of folk art applique blocks that were swapped in the last century. Plus there is a border I saw on Pinterest that wants to get on it. So the plan was to spend a lot of the weekend prepping blocks for Eli and finishing the lattice for Nate.

Well, one thing led to another, you know how that goes, and by the time I wandered down to the studio, I was not quite as focused on my original purpose as I should have been. Too bad, because what caught my eye was the strings that I had won in Julie's recent give-away. Julie had separated the strings into two different groups and right away I knew that one group was Sweet Strings and the other was Sophisticated Strings. I picked up the Sophisticated Strings, just to look at them, mind you, and that was when the trouble began. I thought of some nice Kaffe and batiks and odds and ends that would nicely supplement Julie's offering and started to cut. And then I found some muslin left-over from a recent quilt back. And, well, you would have done the same thing, I am sure.

I'd never done anything with strings before. Never. I cut twenty-five nine-inch foundations. I had a lot of one particular Kaffe-or-Kaffe-affiliate print and cut plenty of that to use for the center string on each block. And so it began.

At this point I have twenty-five string blocks in various stages of completion, most of them pretty darned far along. And it just so happens that I need a charity baby-size quilt for the first week in October. And Sophisticated Strings are going to fill the bill.

Nate and Eli? I'll get back to them once this is out of my system. Unless the Sweet Strings sing to me.

Oh, dear.

Well, it's Julie's fault, don't you think?