Roman Stripes String Quilt
Like many of my quilts, this newly finished quilt has been a long time in the making. Roman Stripes is a pattern that used to be popular with Amish quilters (and may still be, although I didn’t see it when I visited Pennsylvania Dutch country a few years ago.) I adapted the pattern by making the striped half of the blocks from fabric strings. I started out with this pile of scraps:
and began making string quilt blocks a couple of years ago. Then I spent some time considering which fabric to use for the “plain” half of the Roman Stripes block. In the end, I chose this dark maroon. 
Next, I made a bunch of blocks, then lost about half of them somewhere in my sewing room. After much searching, they have yet to be found. Someone will dig them out from behind a piece of furniture after my funeral, I guess.
This week I got a new head of steam. I made enough new string blocks to complete the quilt, then laid them out:
Sewing them together was positively exciting, because it was the first project I did on my brand new sewing machine, a Janome Memory Craft 8900. 
The same goes for the binding, because I got to use my new decorative stitches for the first time. Here’s a detail that I hope shows you the blanket stitch and floral stitch I used to secure the binding.
Here’s another detail view just for the fun of it:
And here’s the finished quilt. It’s very satisfying to see scraps turned into something beautiful. 
