A bit of Sunday Sewing

Today is the first day of the Canton Village Bloggers' Block of the Month  - I'm going to make mine in scrappy blues and neutrals.  There seems to be quite a good supply of those fabrics in all of my strip bins, as well as yardage in my stash.  All the block # 1 components could be made from 2.5" strips and squares.  I'm keeping all the pertinent links for this project on a Blog Page here.

After finding a handful of colourful 9 patches in my 2.5" strip bin, I decided to keep making them so I could use them as the centres of Sister's Choice blocks - it will be a very colourful and scrappy project.  I'll be making these along with my Bloggers' BOM blocks every month.  The Sister's Choice blocks will finish at 10" square so I will probably want to make the quilt 6 by 8 (48 blocks).  I already have 19 nine-patches so only need another 29 before I move on to the next phase of these blocks.

I like the fast piecing method I read about on Quiltville - where to make a scrappy 9 patch you pull two strips plus a square from your strip bin.  As these are being made from 2.5" strips, I needed to cut two 10" strips in contrasting colours plus a 2.5" square of one of the colours.

After sewing the two strips together, and ironing, the strips are then subcut into 2.5" segments.

Then laid out for chain piecing.

 I made another two blocks for my Traditional Tuesday Sampler (blog page on that project is here).  I did determine that my seam allowance was a couple of threads off, but increased the components by 1/8" anyway.  There wasn't much to trim off to make the blocks 6.5" square.

Here's the pile of scrappy 4 patches that were run through as leaders n' enders during today's sewing.  I've found a couple of patterns I like that will use up some 4patches.  One requires 3.5" HSTs and the other 3.5" strips with sew n' flip corners.  Both ideas require some cutting to proceed, which I hope to have done before I run out of leader n' ender two-patches.

I'm making seriously good progress on the 2.5" HSTs I've been trimming.  Here's a pic of the trimmed box.  Amazing how fast it goes, even if only trimming 20 or 30 a day.

And this is all that is left in the "untrimmed" box.  I am on track to be done with this trimming business before the end of October.  I've found a couple of patterns that use a lot of HSTs.  They too require cutting components.

I can see I will have quite a bit of fabric cutting to do to use up some of these components.  Tonight?  I'm planning on handstitching binding and watching television.