Climbing Back Into the Saddle

I felt so well the other morning that I picked up the patches I'd cut a month or more ago for a couple of friendship block requests and sewed the blocks together. Then I moved on to my local guild's current block of the month. I was able to pull nearly all of the necessary patches from my tin of pre-cut squares and triangles.

That was so much fun that I made another one the next day, again nearly all out of pre-cut patches.

I have one project that is hanging over my head but I haven't felt up to tackling it yet. I wanted something fairly simple to piece and sew. Last fall C~ passed a couple of batik panels to me from her stash. I've had quite a stack of African prints taking up space on my shelves; this looked like a good opportunity to get them out and finally do something with them.

The first thing I did was to trim the panels. I did my best to center them but they were printed off kilter on the fabric and have uneven edges to boot. I don't think my brain was quite up to speed yet either!

I put a second framing strip around the panels to bring them up to a size that would make the math easier as I continued to build the quilt top.

Here's a close up of the print I used:

The last couple of days have been spent pressing African prints and cutting them into 8" (finished) half-square triangles. This was not my original plan but I discovered that most of my African prints were only 9 inches wide or rough 9.5" squares. I needed bigger cuts for my original plan.

Now I have a pile of HST's to play with on the design wall.

I was thinking of a strippy set within a horizontal format. We'll just have to see how things develop!