Organizing a String Quilt

 

String quilts are often a explosion of color with fabrics placed rather randomly as they come out of the scrap bag. We've been looking at some great examples over at the QuiltHistorySouth Facebook group.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2427588900863781/

Dark, light, dark light---some thought given to contrast.

A few follow a different rule---place a consistent color in one strip and you get a more organized effect.

The Louisiana Folk Life project recorded this string design

 based on triangles by Sallie McKinnie Graves ( 1886-1968)

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1B-3A-7AE

Here's another in a similar pattern by Ruth Eubanks

from the North Carolina project.

One way to look at Ruth's triangular unit and block.

\

Little Boy's Britches by Sally Anna Ingraham Parker, Haynesville, Arkansas

Collection of the Old State House Museum in Arkansas

Sally's quilt organizes the view by piecing a consistent

color in the center strip of each triangle.

It's a simple way of organizing a string quilt (if one

wanted to organize a string quilt.)

I've been fascinated by this pattern which is just a string pieced diamond

with a consistent black strip in the center.

I called it a Victorian Puzzle

I recently found the pattern in the very influential Comfort magazine,

published in October 1911, a decade or more after the Victorian era.

Three posts:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2012/02/victorian-puzzle-saga-i.html
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2012/02/victorian-puzzle-saga-ii.htmlhttp://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2016/12/victorian-puzzle-revisited.html

Or make the dark strip go the other way.

Marjorie Childress Collection

Here's an unusual top, a fan block but rectangular and both fan and background

are pieced. Each fan has a pink strip in the center

As a square block