Falling Off the Blog Wagon & Current Project

Here it is September, and clearly I have fallen off the blog wagon after an enthusiastic start. It is my intention to blog about old projects in addition to the current, but I started to get a bit hung up chasing down pictures, which would then have to be scanned. And then there was the decisions involved around how to organize and possibly group projects so they could be written about. I got busy and well, I fell off the wagon.

In an effort to climb back on, I will introduce my current project in progress.

Recently I bought Jinny Beyer's The Quilter's Album and used it to find an interesting pattern for a quilt for my grown son. The book offers 4050 grid patterns with a colored in version, all the calculations and mechanics of making the block is up to you.

Here is what my chosen block looked like. It's based on a 16X16 grid, which I have chosen to make each grid block 2 X 2 inches (because I don't want to work with the smaller squares and half triangles). There are 196 triangles in this block!

I took some time to work out how I would put the block together and after some hairpulling, I decided to work the smaller triangles in strips by paper piecing. Not my favorite method, but I felt it would be the most sane route. I like a scrappy so I have used different blues and oranges in each block, with a few of the yellows repeating (10 fabrics, including fabrics taken from 2 of his old Hawaiian-style shirts). The colors, blue and orange, are his choice. And here is what a completed block looks like:

And here is what pictures of the 6 completed blocks look like brought together with Photoshop:

I've definitely gained some gray hairs putting these blocks together and attempting to match all those triangle points (currently 1176 triangles with 3 more blocks to go). I'm not a perfectionist by any means, but there has been some serious seam-ripping and re-stitching. I'm using my 1/4 foot now, despite the fact that it tends to slide on the paper.

So, that's what I'm working on now.