Made It: Fabric Garland

Hello! At the end of January I bought a bagful of fabric pieces, mentioned here, thinking they could be used to make some sort of decorative garland. Decided to do just that over this past week. 

Here's the pile of fabrics I had to start out with:

I guess you can say I'm a quilt piece "rescuer"; I seem to feel the need to save these unused fabrics from thrift store oblivion. (There are worse things one can do than that, I'm sure.) For a dollar, I was rewarded with those pretty prints. At the time of purchase, I wasn't sure if all the fabrics were vintage, but upon closer inspection, I determined that quite a few were. Their yellowed edges gave them away! 

My first plan was to sew a couple of pieces together, then add more of these pairs to make a chain of sorts:

Meh. Decided I didn't care for this look. 

While sorting the fabrics I noticed that some pieces had been cut a bit shorter:

So I decided to use these in the construction of my chains, beginning with this shape:

An "x" stitched in white perle cotton was used to attach the two pieces together at the center top and bottom. I had first tried using small vintage buttons to sew the two sections together, but decided the buttons seemed too clunky.

I had fun putting together different prints; didn't feel to need to have a matched look. 

Further along in the process: The middles of the chains were joined with another perle cotton "x". I strung a length of cotton twine through each top "x", for hanging purposes. 

The bay window area of our front parlor (yes, the original function of the room) is nine feet long. I ended up needing 26 chains on the twine for that length.

The finished garland:

I know it's a little hard to see it up there in the pic, above the bay window valances, so here's a close up:

I like how this turned out - the garland is delicate in color and appearance, which is fine with me. And since it was simply sewn together, it'll be easy to snip apart if I tire of it. 

Then I can figure out another project for these quilt pieces if I want! Such is the life of a quilt piece rescuer, I guess.