The rest of the triangles and squares

One by one I am getting rid of my boxes of fabric scraps. I've used up pretty much all of the contents of my old box of triangles and large squares. I haven't finished anything, but I've sewn together five tops in the last few weeks. These are the last three. Previously I made this top out of all of the pinwheels in the box, and then this smaller one out of the medium triangles.

I really love this one. I took all of my six-inch squares and paired them up. Then sewed them around the edges, face to face, and cut them through the diagonal into four half-square triangles. Then made the four squares into pinwheels. Of course when you do this the edges are on the bias. So I thought, why not do an on-point setting? I've done this before. I had exactly enough squares to make 51 pinwheels. The one I left out was dark blue and light purple solid. Maybe I should have left out the pastel solid one that stands out like a sore thumb, but it has a friend in the top row. The edges were constructed from scratch. Here is another one that I made this way.

I was going to make all of my four-inch squares into half-square triangles, the usual way. However this would have been foolish. I like this layout. It's not a full-sized quilt top, but I could add a border. At any rate it is going to live in the UFO bin for a while.

Finally here is what I did with the half-square triangles already made, plus a few more that I made out of 3 1/2 inch squares and a few 4 inch squares that I didn't use in the previous quilt top. I think it's really ugly but the goal was to take 121 half-square triangles regardless of whether they match or not and squeeze them into an 11 x 11 quilt. It's small, will fit on a wall somewhere if I ever finish it, and if anyone can stand to look at it. The goal of a work of art is to draw the viewer in and capture their eyes (and imagination). You don't want the eye to lock in on any one part of the work. But in this case the eye wanders around looking for something that doesn't make you want to run away.

Using up the small triangles

I made this out of pretty much all of the 2 1/2 inch half-square triangles that I had in the triangle box. The goal is to get rid of the triangle box and beyond that to stop saving small bits of fabric. The pattern is called broken dishes.

I made eccentric star blocks out of the 2 inch triangles. I like the creative use of odd scraps, but it feels a little crazy. So this is part of a campaign to rid myself of the scrap collection. I have enough to last a while longer anyway.

Snow days project

There have been quite a few snow days in Massachusetts this month. We got about five feet of snow - as I write there is more to come. So I took a few piles of kid prints that I acquired by buying a grab bag (never again). I had grouped the prints into "compatible" colorways (some may disagree), and I cut them out and added a few of my own fabrics to complete them. There are two additional tops that still need a border. Of course they are only tops. They are now UFOs that I can add to my growing collection of quilt tops that need to be quilted.

I used up the wild animal prints for this top. I added the other fabrics from my stash. All of these tops are about 39" square.

Here I combined some quasi-pastel cat prints and an assortment of sea animals and halloween frogs. I only added the floral fabric adjacent to the whales and the faux batik magenta print in the corners.

This one was the hardest - the only fabric I had in this pile was some red and blue prints with numbers, cats on numbers and a large piece of a teddy bear print with quite a few teddy bears already removed by someone else. I had chosen the pencil pattern border print to go with it. It took me a while to figure out that I should cut 3 inch squares and add a border. Once I did that, I had to use five of my own red and blue prints to fill in the gaps. I considered just throwing out the kid print fabric, because there was so little of it, but in the end I think I did the right thing.