I'm not working on this project much - still hand quilting most of the time - but I have been thinking about it a lot and once or twice I've got my bits out of the box and shuffled them round. It turns out this has been a useful approach.
Here are the blocks I had made, laid out randomly.
I've now taken out those yellow squares. The yellow was one of the things I liked about my original fabric pull, but it's not working for me here. Maybe it will be back, but not in this form.
I've played around with adding sashing of some description. This photo is probably my favourite shot of this project, but clearly ten wee blocks and one little strip of sashing don't add up to a quilt.
I've played around with adding an extra shape.
But then it hit me: the problem I have with this (and I had it last time I worked with strings too, so I should have figured it out sooner) is that it is all too square, too straight, too tidy. I haven't been too fussy about the size of my foundation squares and have cut my strips freehand, but things still come out looking pretty neat. Of course I know that a big mass of string blocks look quite different from a handful and can acquire their own glorious mad energy, but right now this is all a bit static for my liking.
So at least I understand my problem; now I just have to figure out what to do about it.