WIP Wednesday: String Quilt and Charm Swap

First the pretty pictures- I finished cutting my charms for the Christmas Charm Swap! Check it out:

from these fabrics:

Super cute right? They are Cherry Christmas: Advent Christmas Washing Line by Aneela Hoey for Moda Fabrics and Nordic Holiday by Michael Miller. The Nordic holiday cut up surprisingly well.

I used BacanThenEggs tutorial on cutting charms in 10 cuts - once thought about it, it worked great and went really fast. The folding seems complicated but once you pick up your fabric and fold it, it's fairly obvious. Also, they're actually the right size!

Now to the less pretty... I've been working on my first ever paper pieced string block quilt for the 100 Quilts for Kids QAL - the 20 inch blocks. ... At first I hated it. Than I added white strips to the other half of the block and was ok with it, emotionally prepared to not "love" it like I did the first quilt. The white stripes would add a nice diamond pattern in at the center and look kind of cool. The lines are a little wonky, it kept wrinkling up with the paper and I couldnt get the top fabric to keep from moving away from the bottom fabric (gah??? why??)...

Obviously I haven't trimmed it down yet. I was totally ... "ok" with how it looked. So I tore the paper out... to find...

Several of the strips were only attached to the paper. See the hole between the green and gray in the top left? there, by the bottom right navy, the right of middle dark blue... several places. So I'm not gonna lie, after struggling with this one block for the better part of 3 days, I cried. I tried to fix it but managed to wrinkle it and in some places make it worse. 

My boyfriend says "Maybe the paper thing isn't for you". I think he may be right. I'm fairly certain this is how UFO's are made. So tonight I'm going to take it out of the corner where I threw it at the end of the night, fold it up and stick it in my closet. Than I'm going to make a different quilt for kids. Maybe one without... paper. ..or so many straight lines.