Sand, strings and squares

And here's the sand, photo taken by my son on a beach near Dargerville, Bayley's Beach I think.  What amazing colours - but then with my love of orange I would think that.....

The strings on the hanger have been tugging at me lately, these are the ones I cut with a strip of plastic before the days of proper marked rulers, they are 3cm which makes it a bit awkward for cutting more now, but I solved the problem by using one of the Qtools Cutting Edges - a repositionable [I didn't think this was a word, but it's there on the wrapping!] strip of plastic which I applied on the underside of the ruler, so when I slide the ruler towards the fabric it stops with the correct measurement against the  pretty (orange) strip.  I hope you follow that ......

I decided to take a random bunch of strips and join end to end, a la jelly roll -

Quite an eclectic mix, so I joined a whole lot then bottom to top I sewed into a strip of two and then into a strip of four - which I then cut into squares, put into some order and thought about borders.

The two squares that were the odd ones out I put into the corners, decided this was too pale, so

I beefed it up a bit with the blue and it's another for the hospital.  I think this technique has possibilities using different length or width of strips,

Some while ago I showed some plaid squares I bought in the UK on my last trip, and one day the mood was right, so I started joining them, at random - just any two had to be of different value - until I had my nine patches then I played with them on the design wall with alternate squares from my plaid stash

More jiggling or juggling was required -

A few more tweaks and on went the border

All ready for a gentleman, or his dog, I think!

And talking of tweaking, either you didn't notice, or were too polite to tell me, but the last top I showed - the one using the left overs from the Marriage Quilt - had a mistake.  I kept looking at the last two photos on my blog and something wasn't right - then I picked up the quilt and, sure enough, the bottom row was on the wrong way!

The blocks were supposed to follow the colours diagonally - and now they do!

And as I head off to more stitching, I want to thank you for your comments - and share with you this thought,"Old minds are like old horses: you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order." John Adams - not that I'm saying I'm old, it's just something to bear in mind for when that happens!

We'll talk again soon, take care
June