This year's Bonnie Hunter Mystery is the fourth year I've played along. While I loved making Allietare, En Provence, and On Ringo Lake, I'd always hoped that Bonnie would revisit the string blocks that she used in mystery quilts of old.
And hooray hooray - this year's the year!
Clue #4 dropped on Friday morning, and not only did it involve string blocks, but it involved making
orange string blocks!
Oh,
bliss!
There's just one teensy-tiny problem.
String piecing is just so... so...
untidy.
(If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of People Who Are Extremely Stingy and People Who are Anal-Retentive, you would find me in the overlap.) (I'm not kidding.)
So I gave the process a lot of thought and decided on a way that made the least waste and the least mess. I'm probably violating the spirit of stringness here, but so it goes.
Grabbing the stack of old phone books that my dad had just that morning added to the kindling pile (good thing I was paying attention since I'd forgotten to tell him I wanted them), I started cutting and marking pages.
This page is going to give me six of those pretty little orange string blocks.
And here is where you can see me in action, in all my OCD glory.
Instead of starting the first strip in the center and working out from there, I lined up the edge of the fabric and the edge of the paper. Perfectly. Because of course I did.
Surprisingly, I can actually sew crooked strips on after that first one without twitching. But that first one...
Here you can see I'm bearing down on the red line that I marked on my paper. (You can see both red lines in the photo of my prepped paper above) That line is where the block unit will be cut, so I know I have to watch out here and allow a wide enough strip that the seam allowances stay out of the seam allowances, if you know what I mean.
It's clear in this next photo, where that solid orange strip is in the middle of the strip set - it's wide enough to allow lots of leeway. The strip on the right is where I trimmed on the other red line, and that little strip will be used in the next block.
Here's a view of the back where you can see just how stingy I am. This is how I trim as I sew, so there's a minimum of waste.
We all have our little quirks...
Once the paper was covered and trimmed to size, I sliced it into thirds
and then cut them in half to yield six string-pieced units.
And then I did a bunch more!
I started to throw out these leftover bits of paper that had been trimmed off the end of each set of blocks, but then realized if I saved them, I wouldn't have to count all those little blocks - all I have to do is count these papers and multiply by six! Given the
troubles I've had with block-counting lately, this seems like a good plan.
Adding these clue #4s to the bin (and including the chevrons that I've got on the pressing board waiting to be flattened), I've now got a bit more than half of the units I'll need for each clue.
I'll carry on making more of all these, using them as leader/enders for my other sewing. Onwards and upwards! And stringing all the way...
Linking with Quilting is more fun than Housework for
Oh Scrap, and with Quiltville's
Clue Four Linky Party. Oh the scraps that you'll see!
