Mother's Day....

I've had a very relaxing mother's day......especially since neither of my sons are home! Jeff spent the weekend with a friend who was moving to the next town...he helped them move, and just stayed there helping with boxes, etc..until later tonight. He did call a couple times.

I worked this afternoon on an idea floating in my head. I have 2 cram packed bins of 2.5" strips. I wanted a block that would use the strips, but something really easy in construction.

Thanks to the use of my easy angle ruler (Oh, I LOVE THIS RULER!) all I had to do was pair a light and a dark 2.5" X 18" strip with right sides together, cut 9 triangle pairs, feed them through the machine one after the other already matched up, and then after pressing....assemble the block like a simple 9 patch. It is working so slick, and I have made 14 blocks in just a few hours. Not sure how I'm going to set them, I'm thinking of a solid color for setting fabric, and I am more prone to putting them on point than setting them straight with an alternate block. I think this is called "hovering hawks"...or maybe that's just my mind putting ideas in my head.

You can see one really scrappy block in there...that's because I could actually get 10 triangle pairs out of a pair of 18" strips, so I cut 10 pairs and set the spares aside. When I'd done more than 9 blocks, I decided to see what one block made with all the leftovers would look like. I think they will add a spark of "fun to look at" when all the other blocks are only in two fabrics. I might do some other blocks with alternate fabrics or backgrounds added too, like if a strip is too short to cut all the same background, use extra triangles of another background to fill in. Substitution. I think that's the technical word for it.

The brick thing....thanks for all the comments. I'm still not sure what I want to do with it, but I do know that I don't want to do a monochromatic thing, nor do I want to separate anything with mortar, because that is going to give a more MODERN look and I'm looking for a more muddy old utility quilt look, with a chaos of fabrics that don't go together, kind of like a mishmash from the 1940's. It's still on the back burner. I might keep going the way it's going and just finish it. The blocks are done. I'm not taking anything apart, and I'm not starting over. This just might end up being a beach blanket, you know? Sometimes you just gotta try things even if they don't turn out the way you thought.

Bonnie