Fun with Strings

I am one of those quilters that saves even the smallest of scraps as I have great fun creating with these leftovers, or what some quilters would deem as trash.  If the scraps are too small for me to use, which has to be pretty small by the way, they go in the pillowcase for the pet pillows I make for the animal shelters.  I am particularly enamored with strings.  I LOVE to make string quilts.  It always amazes me that you can throw a mishmash of fabrics together, sew them randomly, and produce a beautiful quilt.  Where I'm going with this is a little project I started today with my shorter strings.

I had been working on payroll filings for hours and I hit the wall.  Fortunately for me, I not only work for myself, but I also work from home, which means that when I need to get away from work for awhile, I can go sew.  So that is what I did.  First I pulled out these:

Less than an hour later, I had these:

The first picture shows the tins where I keep my shorter strings.  Are you surprised that they are puppy and kitty tins?  LOL  Stacked in front of the tins are used Shout color catcher sheets.  Since they can obviously go through the washer, I saved them as I thought they might work as foundations for a string quilt.  I've heard of people using dryer sheets, so I figured why not try it.  I used the following rules for piecing my string rectangles.

Are you kidding me?  I didn't have any rules.  This was supposed to give my brain a break, remember?  Actually, I did apply one rule and that was to start with a wider strip for the end as that just makes practical sense for when the blocks need to be sewn together.  After that, I pretty much just grabbed a string from the tin, provided it was long enough, randomly alternating between light and dark.  I now have a pile of 12 rectangles that are at least 1/3 covered in strings.  I had a blast and once I was done, my head was clear and I was ready to get back to work.