Fruitcake scrappy strings

Lately I've felt the need to use up fabric and complete the quilts that I bought fabric for but never did get beyond the planning stage.  I bought a Fruitcake fat eighth bundle and two charm packs and made the Charming Stars quilt for my sister in law in 2011.  That left 4.5 x 14" strips, the 2 charm packs, 2 quarter yards of red and green grunge solid, and some extra white and green snowflake fabric from the backing.  

 The extra backing fabric became my center strings.  I used up the rest of the fat eight bundle on the strips immediately to either side and then started piecing together charm squares and other random fabrics to make more strings.  For the Charming Stars quilt, we chose not to use the mostly white fabric for stars because there wasn't enough contrast.  Those ended up being cut on the diagonal and turned into the final pieces of each block (along with less than 11 5" squares of Kona white when I ran out of the other whites)

 The scrappy strings and the large white triangles weren't in the game plan originally, but it was an easy way to make the quilt a reasonable lap size and not purchase more fabric to complete the quilt top.  So, now I have 56 8.5" string blocks ready to be pieced into a quilt and a whole lot of paper to tear off.

But, it is one less bag of fabric waiting in a bin for me to start and finish a project on my to do list.  Or, the "I should really use this stuff up before I get anything else" list.