Block 17: Apron Strings

This week's block from the Farm Girl Vintage quilt is Apron Strings. Or that's what this designer calls it to fit into the theme. She designed each quarter to have the same size stripes and arranged them so they make a concentric squares pattern.

I misread (or didn't read) the instructions and ended up with four completely different quadrants. I did think out the layout and you can see that I have the reds and dark blues opposite each other, etc. I didn't fussy cut the bicycle--it happily just happened to work out just right.

This is a block that I've seen most often done with scraps of fabrics and various leftovers. Most people stitch up the quadrants separately (so squares with all of the strips in one direction) with whatever width of fabric they have. Then you cut out a square from what you've sewn together. Often each square will be the same colour, or all lights or all darks and then you can arrange them in many, many ways. Click here for a Google images search for some "string quilts", as they're called. They can be quite stunning.

Here is the back--nothing too fancy this week, but I don't have a lot to take a picture of! :)

Here are all the blocks so far in a mock layout:

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Here is Kim's block:

You can see in hers how the colours are mirrored in diagonal blocks. (Like the blue and paisley fabrics in the top left and bottom right squares, and the brown and purple flower fabrics in the top right and bottom left squares.)

When Kim first showed it to me on Skype, she wasn't very happy with it even though she liked many of the fabric combinations. After we talked it through, we decided she just needed to change the outer triangles so that the two lights were opposite each other. This was a relatively easy fix so she tried it and we agree the final look is better.