Something From Almost Nothing!

Remember these?

Two 14" scrappy trip blocks I made out of strata I'd been given many years ago. After I showed them to you in a recent post I moved them around on the design wall a bit.

I left them this way overnight. The next morning I went through my Parts Dept. and dug out some blocks I might use to fill in that negative space on either side of the scrappy trip blocks.

I decided to use these leftovers from the black and white and green quilt I made last year.

I filled in the empty slots with scrap strips. This created a flimsy about 24" x 28" if I remember correctly. I wanted to build it up to make it easier to use my six inch parts for the next round of blocks. Inspired by the Contrary Wife quilt that Quilt Diva Julie recently finished I made up some 4" butterfly units. (That's what I'm calling them anyway!) I also had a few 4" crazy patch blocks that had been given to me years ago. I put them on the ends and filled in with the butterflies.

At this point I felt all that activity needed a calming influence. The top was crying out for some red so those were the stacks I searched through in my stash. Once that was in place I auditioned blocks again. These 8" blocks made the cut:

I didn't have all of these in the Parts Department already but I only had to make a few more. However, it took a while to find just the right thing to fill that whole on the left side in the picture above.

After a lot of rearranging I finally decided to just use a couple more of the butterfly units in a four patch block.

There's more to come but that will be another post for another day. ;- ) Right now I'm still trying to recover completely from my first ever trip to a Hobby Lobby store. One just opened up in our little town; I've been so excited about the additional inventory they would make available. The store itself wasn't as toxic as I feared it might be - at least at first. My reactions haven't been severe, thank Goodness, but my body seems to be slow to return to normal. The best part was that nearly everything I bought yesterday was on sale! I have a new needlepoint case to stitch on when my brain is not up to anything more demanding and some new charms to use in my bead journal projects. :-D