There's small....and then there's SMALL

I've been thinking about making Bonnie Hunter's Roll Roll Cotton Boll quilt so Wednesday afternoon found me digging around in my string drawers, picking out neutral/pale strings for the string blocks in RRCB. After three meetings in three days, two where I was hosting, it was amazingly soothing.  I just grabbed anything I thought would work & tossed it in a pile. I did have to wonder though about some of the really short, narrow pieces I found. Finally I remembered that several years ago I had it in my head to make 8-point star blocks, probably about 18" or so, and all the diamonds in each star were going to be string pieced. For that project short and narrow was good. Some were really small.  Today I went through the basketful,

sorting strings. Long ones on the left, shorties on the right. I hate grabbing strings while I'm sewing and finding two or three that are too short before I find the right length. A few of the shorties I even sewed together to make a more useful length.  Crazy??  Maybe. So now I have the basket full of longer strings, a small box of shorties, and a small tin full of wide shorties and triangles for the corners.

The string drawers aren't crammed quite as  full now, but I think I'll have to make "Fair & Square" from Bonnie's book Scraps & Shirttails II: Continuing the Art of Quilting Green  to use up a bunch of the colored ones. Gosh, I might even have to make some of those star blocks if that doesn't do the job.