Playing with Solid HST's

     I just finished up a one week staycation which I bookended with this little project.

      I've always admired the work that Jayne at Twiggy and Opal and Carrie at Zenquilter do, playing around with geometric shapes. This is something I have wanted to do for some time and I decided that now was the time to do it.  I love bright solid fabrics and I've been accumulating quite a few over the last year, but this being my first go at this practise I started out with these strips: three yellows, two greens, two blues and two purples.

     These are left over strips from a block of the month that I joined a few years ago and never kept up with.  I saw a post for random grey half square triangles on the Stash Bee blog.  Sorry you have to scroll quite far down the page to see it.

The post was by Amanda who blogs at Fabric Engineer and I thought I would give this method a shot.

     The fabric cut down nicely to 3 1/2 inch squares.

     I put the squares into a bag and pulled them out without looking at them.  As long as the two pieces I pulled were not identical I sewed them into half square triangles.  Here's a shot where I put some up on the design wall to get an idea of what was going on before I trimmed them.

     At this point I wasn't too sure how I felt about this process because there seemed to be an awful lot going on with this grouping, but as I was trimming the blocks down to 3 inches I started dividing them into piles by colour.

     I could see that I had only two blocks with both green and blue in them.  I had a lot with blue, a lot with green and a few with neither green or blue.  I decided to go with the blue grouping and to arrange them on the design wall in a way that I found pleasing to my eye.  I started out with this.

Then winnowed it down to this.

I sewed it together with my trusty little machine and when my better machine came back from servicing I quilted it with straight line quilting using a golden orange Aurifil 50 wt thread which I believe is number 2135.

          I had a great time working through this process and I love the little mini quilt that resulted and just in case you are wondering what happened to the other blocks.  I counted the green blocks and put them back in the bag.  I then took them out of the bag drew them out without looking at them, then placed them in order on the design wall.  This is the result.

     What do you think?  Should I sew them together as is or shift them about?

     While you are contemplating that I'll leave you here with a picture of Benni just incase you missed him.  I'll be linking up with Beth of  Cooking Up Quilts for Main Crush Monday and with Lorna of Sew Fresh Quilts for Let's Bee Social,  and because this was made from strips that I consider to be scraps I'll link it up to the next Scraptastic Tuesday link up with Leanne of She Can Quilt.

     And then it's back to work.