Yes. Quilting. I know. Where is the real Creative Fidget and who is this imposter?

Well, I had to do something with all the flannelette strips I culled from the weaving yarn stash. I could have just tossed it all into the fabric recycling box, but I decided to give strip quilting a try. There are batches of aqua, light blue, red, purple, rainbow and a rather large accumulation of leftover strips from the spectrum rugs.

Fortunately, not many of the strips had edges turned in and ironed, so it wasn’t much work to iron them flat again. The red batch is the only one still to be cut into strips, so it may become a non-strip type of quilt. I chose the light blue batch to begin with, and soon hit at snag.

When weaving fabric into rugs not a lot of the pattern shows, just a general impression of colour. You can mix up prints of monkeys with prints of flowers and nobody would know. It also isn’t immediately apparent when the same fabric is sewn to itself. But when quilting, both of these things are obvious. A large proportion of the blue batch was the same pale, Japanese inspired print of fans along with a subtle gingham print, a few flower patterns and a single plain blue… with the occasional glaring length of cartoony characters or bold stripes. Once I cut out the latter, I had very little variation in fabric. That meant a trip to the fabric store to buy more flannelette and, well, we were having the sort of weather that didn’t make shopping trips appealing so I didn’t want to do that yet.

I did consider mixing the aqua batch in with the blue, but the combo didn’t excite me and I really wanted to have a aqua-only quilt because I had a pair of pjs of my Mum’s I wanted to include. Nope. Until I had more fabric, the blue quilt would have to be put aside.

So I switched to the aqua quilt. That batch of fabric didn’t have any unharmonious prints to remove and it was already sewn into three long strips alternating between two prints. Trouble was, even after I cut up and spliced in the fabric from Mum’s pjs, having only three different prints meant there was no way they could align without too much of the same print lying next to itself.

The simplest solution I could think of was to do every second strip in a single, new fabric. So gave in and I headed to the fabric store, where bought three meters of plain aqua fabric.

This worked beautifully.

It took me four days to sew the strips together, working a few hours each day in the hope my back wouldn’t seize up in protest. I didn’t love the endless sewing together of strips. I didn’t hate it either.

But I did decide that sewing the blue quilt needed to be a little bit more interesting.