Tied Up

Ages ago I acquired a couple of bags of  men's ties and decided to make a start on putting them into a quilt.
I wanted to avoid having to use stabiliser to control the delicate fabrics, so opted for an improvised-style quilt design that would enable me to keep them straight and controlled (that was the aim anyway...)

• I cut the tie fabric into usable pieces and then into 2 & 1/2"  strips of varying lengths . I actually found that, with care, I could avoid stretching the tie fabric. I rejected about 10% of the ties as they were just too fragile.
• I then cut 15 of my husband's old white cotton shirts into 2" strips, leaving some uncut for later use.  
• next I stitched a white strip to each tie strip to form units of varying lengths. This helped to control the tie fabric. Each unit was squared off with my trusty rotary cutter.
• the next step was to sew a second white strip to a number of the shorter units and again each was squared off. 
• I then muddled all the units into 30 piles to randomise the colours with the idea that each pile would form a block. 
• next I sewed unit to unit to form vaguely square or rectangular blocks (see photo below)

In reality, as I started to put the jigsaw of units together, I cherry picked units of similar size so that I could match them up without having to trim off any nice tie fabric. From now on I'm essentially following my 'No Maths' workshop instructions which involve accurate trimming and squaring off each time I add another strip or unit. This is essential to avoid having a quilt top that veers out of control as you add more and more units.
The basic rules from now on are:

• no tie fabric is seamed next to another tie fabric, to give the effect of rectangles and squares of colours floating on a white background
• the strips can go in any direction
• fill in any gaps with white strips
• all seams are pressed toward the tie fabric
• square and trim off continually with a large ruler and rotary cutter

When I have a decent number of blocks I will start to sew them all together, again adding white strips of different widths to fill in any gaps. I've no idea how big it will be in the end

I might need to steal more shirts though...