My first bee quilt finished

I am in three bees on Flickr but I've only had my 'month' in the Simply Strings bee so far. I joined because my scrap bins were/are/will always be overflowing with a mish-mash of different colours and styles of fabric and I thought string quilting would be a good way to use them up.

I had already done two traditional string quilts and was trying to think of a different shape for string quilting when I decided upon hearts:

I sent everyone in my bee three different heart shaped paper pieces and asked them to string piece horizontally. I provided the fabric but asked if they could use a scrap from their own stash for each heart so that when I looked at them there would be fabric in them that I didn't recognise.

All the hearts came back and I made it into this:

I initially blanket stitched the hearts to the quilt top and the batting at the same time and then added the backing and quilted around the hearts to secure all three layers together. This method makes the heart 'pop' which you can't really get the feel of in the pictures.

And 'no', no-ones blocks were 'relegated' to the back! I only had a yard of the fabric that I wanted to use as the background fabric for the front so I put as many hearts as I thought I could on the front and then took the rest and put them on the back. I have made no more hearts than the three example ones in the beginning so we've all got three hearts each on this quilt!

The photos don't do it justice (honest!) as the background fabric keeps going fuzzy looking. Just doesn't photograph well. If you click on them though you do get a better idea of how lovely (I think!) the quilt is.

Thank you to the ladies in the Simply Strings bee for giving me a lovely quilt:

Bee mama: Jess

(And then in no particular order)

Kristy

Suzy

Gwen

Kelly

Lisa

Becky

Stephanie

Lynda

Lindsey

Sabah