String quilt scrapbuster - and an everso small but nice giveaway!

For most of the past few months, my scrap pot has been looking like this:

Then I went to bed one night, woke up the next morning and noticed it had acquired a partner.

I didn't want to encourage a life-long friendship so knew I needed to do something about it fairly sharpish otherwise they'd be starting a family and then things would seriously start to get out of hand.

I also had/still have some fabric of which I have long outgrown/don't know why I acquired it in the first place but don't know what to do with.

How can you use tomatoes, bears dressed up as doctors about to perform an operation, reindeers skiing down mountains, lions with thermometers in their mouths (who thinks up these things?), carrots and sheep walking on crutches. I felt the answer lay in another string quilt.

But once I've made one style of quilt, I can't go back and just repeat it again. It becomes monotonous, I know what the end result is going to be and so I don't think I have learnt anything new.

So this time, the diagonal stripe across each square is my black and white cow hide print of previous quilts. I also measured in approx 1 1/2 inches from two diagonal corners and used the cow print so I've sort of ended up with cow print squares.

I still can't think of a better way to use up a complete cross-section of styles and colours of fabric that I am not particularly fond of. So long as the strip cut is narrow enough, I don't think the eye is drawn to any one part of the quilt.

And the sheep on crutches just merge into a whole.

For the back I just took two string squares, cut them on the diagonal and sort of did a pinwheel thing with them.

I hand-quilted it, individual square at a time.

And here it is getting cosy with the absolutely fabulous cushion/pillow cover that was made for me by Lori as part of the Flickr Pillow Talk Swap.

It makes me smile just looking at it because it is so happy and fun and all mine.
Thank you Lori.

P.S. First one to correctly guess my house in the header wins a whole wodge of my scraps! (Bit like spot the ball I know but isn't that half the fun?!)