I started on a new project this past week.  I loooove starting new projects!  It’s only after I make the same block 20 times that I get sick of a project.  This is one I’ve been wanting to try for a long time.  It’s a Spider Web quilt that’s string pieced with scrap pieces.  I still have tons of scrap pieces left over from the Rocky Road quilt I finished earlier this year so it’s perfect.  Here’s a picture of  my organized scrap keeping system.

The pattern I’m using is from a book that I’ve had forever called “Scrap Quilts from the Depression” published by Oxmoor House.  I got the book for another pattern called Kansas Sunflower that I made for my daughter (it only took me 14 years to finish that quilt) but I’ve been wanting to make this quilt as well.  I looked around on the internet to find some other similar patterns and found that most patterns piece the quilt in such a way that you put a strip of background fabric in the middle of a triangle and then string piece the other two corners.  In this way, you end up with pieces of two different spider webs.  It’s a very efficient method of sewing but it looks like your quilt has half spider webs around the outside.

This pattern uses a triangle piece which all the strings are sewn onto and then a background triangle sewn to the top.  Then all those pieces are sewn together for a complete 16 inch finished block.

The bad thing is that I have to trace the pattern onto paper to use as a foundation for the strings – 8 for each block.  Then, of course, I have to rip that off at some point.  The nice thing is that I can use light and dark fabric scraps.  Also, I decided to use up some of my selvage pieces because I thought that would be a cool way to use them.  Not sure if you can see in this picture that I used several selvage pieces.

The last string pieced project took me two years to finish because it does get a little tedious.  Hopefully this one won’t take that long.  I’m already imagining quilting it with a spider web design.