Choosing Fabrics for My Roman Stripes Quilt
Now that I’ve finished piecing the string parts of the blocks for my Roman Stripes quilt, it’s time to choose the fabric for the other half of the blocks.
I wanted to pay homage to the Roman Stripe pattern’s Amish heritage (as much as a quilter from non-traditional Northern California can!) by observing the following rules:
- Frugality. Besides including my string blocks, which use up leftover fabric, I also decided I would only use a fabric I already had in my stash. Also, it’s Lent, and I have given up buying fabric for the next 40 days.
- Solid colors. This was a more severe limitation, because I only have a few solids in my fabric collection. But I do have a few. So I cut squares out of the ones that looked possible, folded one of the string squares in half, and photographed them together.
Here are the three I’m considering.
The red solid in this one comes pretty close to a traditional Roman Stripes block.
I also like this cheery blue:
And while this isn’t very traditional, it is a solid, and I really love yellow!
Here’s a darker maroon:
Maybe I should just stitch up some more string blocks and make all four quilts. I certainly have enough scraps left for a few dozen more string blocks! This pile is just the leftovers cut off of the dozen string blocks I already made. There’s another whole bin full of white scraps sitting on the floor behind the sewing machine.
