Grandma's Apron Strings

Grandma's Apron Strings

It's a top!

75 x 87

How time flies!  I can't believe I started making these blocks back in May 2015. 

The block is called Wheel of Fortune and can be found in the book History Repeated.  Grandma's Apron Strings is my version of that Wheel of Fortune quilt you see on the cover but my quilt has more blocks. 

I used kitchen themed fabrics. I used to make sets of potholders, embroidered dish towels and crocheted dish cloth as Christmas gifts and liked to use kitchen themed fabrics for the potholders. I usually bought 1/2 yard of those fabrics and a potholder didn't take up much so I thought I might as well make a quilt of them. 

I had a pale yellow for the background fabrics in my stash because I had bought that color by mistake when I needed a little darker shade of yellow to finish off a different quilt. And the crazy thought went through my mind that I should use yellow with kitchen fabrics because most of the kitchens I could remember from my younger days were yellow. Sometimes even the appliances were yellow. 

And then we come to the sashing. Somewhere along the line when I was remembering kitchens I thought of grandma (who also taught me to quilt and embroider and all sorts of other useful things) and apron strings and then my mind wandered off to chicken scratch that was on a few of her aprons and I knew that I had to somehow incorporate chicken scratch into the quilt so into the sashing some chicken scratch went.  And you know I love gingham too so it was meant to be. I did have some turquoise cotton gingham with 1/4 inch squares in my stash that was intended for a backing that I ended up using even though I wasn't sure it was the right color for the quilt but in the back of my mind I heard grandma telling me to go ahead and use what I have. So I did. I chicken scratched off and on for a few years on that sashing and just when I thought I had done enough and was ready to assemble the quilt I found out I was only about 2/3 done and had to do more. And that's how time flies, I guess.  And another time while the mind was wandering I thought those X cornerstones looked kind of, maybe a little bit, like crossed apron strings in back. 

The silly thing is that I just ran off and made blocks out of whatever kitchen themed fabrics I had and did not give any thought of color or value. So when it came time to put it all together I thought I should have thought about that but now it's too late so move forward, you silly girl. So I decided on kind of alternating dark and light blocks and ended up making a few more blocks just to make a layout like that all work out. You know I usually sew blocks together randomly but this time I had to arrange them on my design floor. 

And you remove that quilt top from the clothesline and you can see that after several days of clean up after the derecho we still have some clean up to do. But some things we cannot do. Those are low hanging branches that almost reach the gound from...

...that branch on high. 

Hopefully there's blue skies and sunshine ahead! 

I'm off to have a great day. Hope you are too. 

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