Next String quilt

Now that I'm back home for a few weeks, I took some time to assess where I'd left things before I departed for Oregon at the end of October.

Remaining scraps from all the masks I'd made were collected for trimming down into the Scrap User's System:

the Leader-Ender Easy-Breezy blocks pinned in groupings of 10 and more "kits" assembled:

and plans for a no-brainer string quilt underway. I remember wanting something easy to mindlessly sew on in the days before departure, something that would need little planning and could be set aside/picked up with ease. My string bin was full and calling to me, but I remember not wanting to put in extra time trimming phone book pages to a specific size or shape.

As it happened, the phone book I've been using from several homes/cities ago is a nice size and shape for a variation of my usual string projects. It's smaller than the monster phone books of yore--the pages measure 7-1/4" x 9". So I put together a couple of quick mock-ups, and this is the one I selected to work on when I got back home:

Now, I realize that this single bin of strings is but a minute fraction of what dedicated string-and-scrap-piecers keep on hand to create their string quilts. But string quilts aren't my main focus--they're a frugal by-product of my journey while I'm creating other quilts and sewing other projects, so I haven't the storage space dedicated to collecting strings. When this (and the bin for N1C strings) gets too full to cram one more piece into it, it's time to use the strings up!

My first few days back home are basically spent cleaning and waiting for the rest of me to arrive (the mental part). They're very selfish days, spent mainly in my studio. We'll call it quarantining. Once the bulk of the household cleaning was done, I turned my focus on these rectangular blocks and determined proof-of-concept: did I even have enough long strings (in light and dark) to establish the 100 blocks?

Plenty of long dark strings!

Long "light" strings were fewer, but using 12" as a guide I found more than enough were on hand to get the 48 blocks started.

 So, start them I did.

 It soon became obvious that I'd need to count out 52 pages for the dark strips (26 each in both directions) and 48 for the light, unless I wanted to stop periodically and count up what I'd done and figure out what I still needed to do. Once that was done the assembly became fairly mindless, which was what I had in mind all along.

With the long (>12") strips separated out, this remains to work from as I build these blocks. It'll be interesting to see how far I can get and how much remains when I emerge at the end of this.