A "Test Quilt"...

"Hey" to all you beautiful blog readers out there!  Once again...time has gotten away from me!  I'm still here!  I've been doing a lot of quilting so I thought I'd share some of it with you!

A friend of mine, Kevin H. from the "Kevin the Quilter" blog, designed a quilt top and asked me to be a tester for him.  He is a scrap quilter through and through, and this one is made totally of strings!  He named it "Sorta, Kinda Amish" and you can read his blog post about it here.  

I thought I had a lot of strings, but ended up having to pull out some of my ugly 1980's blue FQ's out of my stash and cutting some more.  He had lighter blue strings around his middle red square and darker strings in the border.  Snce I knew I didn't have enough blue, let alone enough to separate them out into "lighter" and "darker", I decided to use neutral strings...which I had a BUNCH of... around the red inner square instead!  

I tend to buy and use neutrals that have a lot of prints on them, so to make the neutral strings more "cohesive" and less assaulting on the eyes, I actually used the back side of the fabric!  Yes...you can do that.  You paid for both sides, so you get to choose which side you want to use!  ;)   By using the backside in this quilt, I think it provides a calm spot for your eyes to rest.

Some of those ugly 1980's "country" blues put to use (the bottom strings)...

If the fabric is still ugly, you just haven't cut it small enough...

Since I was starting to run out of red strings towards the end, instead of using longer strings to make the cornerstones, I divided the block size into fourths, used the shorter strings, and then sewed them together to make the larger cornerstones.  (You can see some of the ugly 1980's blue peeking through on this pic, too!)

Since I rarely use black in my quilting, I ended up having to cut some strings from some black FQ's, too, to get enough for the inner border...

I haven't measured the finished quilt top, but I would estimate it to be about 44" x 44".  Originally, I thought about adding another border and cornerstones to make it bigger, but decided to leave it "as is", which is the original pattern size.  I haven't quilted it, yet, but plan on sandwiching several quilt tops in the future and doing it then.

I want to thank Kevin for letting me test his quilt pattern for him!  It was a lot of fun to make and worked up quickly!  I think I worked on it for about 3 evenings and 1 Saturday.

Loretta