I have to teach our monthly quilt group meeting tonight and the subject is ugly fabric.  Now, none of us may admit to buying ugly fabric today….but, I bet if you looked through your stash at fabrics you bought a few years ago – you may decide that one (or more) are just plain ugly!  Or the fabric design isn’t in style anymore.

The first time I heard anything about ugly fabrics was when I saw Mary Ellen Hopkins talking on a television show (years ago) that there was no such thing as an ugly fabric.  She said if you paired it with the right non-ugly fabrics, you’d take the eye away from the ugly and it would blend in so you didn’t even notice it.  I totally agreed and decided then and there that while building my stash, I would buy fabrics on sale, even if they were ugly. 

After reseraching the topic for a while last night, I found some quilt designs that are perfect for ugly fabrics.  The first was a foundation pieced string quilt.  I found a great history of string quilts here and some more great information about them here. 

This is what I came up with for my blocks:

First, I sewed my strings of fabric to the foundation muslin.

Then, I squared up my block so it was 12″ square

I made four blocks and pieced them together – and what a fun and simple quilt to make, using up some stash scraps as well as hiding the ugly fabric in it!