Thought I’d start out the month of hearts by looking back at one of the blocks I designed last year.

While last month I said I wasn’t starting any new quilts any time soon–well, I changed my mind.

I was stressing about something trivial and thought I would feel better if I could just cut fabric up in little pieces and stitched it back together.

And I did just that and started making the Heart Strips Block.

I love this block and besides making me feel better, some justifications here for starting ANOTHER quilt.

First, I like to keep a couple of finished quilts in my cupboard available to give to friends and family that need a hug. I have always thought to myself, what does one do with all of these quilts that come out of this almost obsessive hobby? Well. Last year I started giving mine away to people that I thought needed a “hug”. The first went to my 19-year-old granddaughter who moved into her first apartment. While she was being very brave by moving out on her own, I think she was a bit afraid, too. The second went to my niece who lost her husband to suicide in 2020. I hadn’t seen her in a few years because she moved far far way. She still has a huge hole in her heart so when she came to visit in December, I gave her one of my “scrappy quilts for scrappy times”. There were happy tears. And my last quilt went to a musician friends whose partner succumbed to cancer. I gave her my “Happy Little Things” quilt at his celebration of life. Every time she sees me she tells me how much she loves the quilt. Makes me feel good that I could make them feel a little better. I need to restock my quilt cabinet!

Second, I have a lot of scraps. Not big enough to use in an entire quilt. But big enough for a scrappy quilt. So this gives me a reason to use some of that stash up.

And third, this is an opportunity to test my tutorial. I had not used this pattern in more than a year and it was good to look at with fresh eyes. While I thought it was okay, I added a couple lines just to clarify. Here’s the new PDF: Heart Strips Final 2022.

Each block is made up of various widths of 8 different 1 1/2″ wide strips plus a background fabric.

I highly recommend starching the fabric first. It’s so much easier to stitch together. I forgot to do that step on the first block I made and it came out a wee bit wonky. I starched the rest of them and they turned out much better.

I’m slowly working my way through different colors. I plan to start out by making four blocks of each. Here I’ve used pink and aqua. When I’m ready to put the quilt together, I’ll add borders to each block.

Or I could add fabric to each corner to make it stand up rather than on it’s side.

I have no deadline for this quilt. I’m working on it when I have a free moment or if I just feel the need to cut up fabric into bits!