Triangle Madness, Week 1 – Strategery

Well hi, everyone!  Welcome to those who are playing along with our triangle insanity.  Never too late to join in if you’re so inclined!  A few folks are already drinking my kool-aid:

• Greta
• Tara
• Anne
• Susan
• Nancy
• Meg

Some people are going to do this with a couple of charm packs, which of course would be super cute, you might just end up wanting borders to make it a nice generous lap size.

Me? I’m staying scrappy.  But just because I’m going for a random look doesn’t mean it’s a total free-for-all around here.  I’ve got to come up with some strategery to this thing. (heh)

I like to create rules and procedures for myself. So here they are:

1. I will go through each of my scrap bins, one at a time, and pull out all pieces large enough to cut into a 5″ square.  My red-and-pink bin was first.  I am trying NOT to be very selective and just use whatever I have, not trying to make any sense of it just yet.

2. I will cut only one square from each print (or solid – I’m using solids, too).  Once I make it through all of my scrap bins, I’ll see where I am. If I still need more, I will probably hit my stash boxes and cut from smaller pieces in there. We’ll see how it goes.

3. After I’ve got a scrap-box-worth of fabrics pulled, I’ll iron a whole bunch at a time and then watch some TV while I cut.  One of the things that bothers me the most about scrap quilting is cutting things one at a time – I’m a chain-piece, stack-and-whack kind of a girl, I hate inefficiency.  So I try to carefully stack several of my similar-sized or similar-shaped scraps on top of one another so that I can end up cutting 4 or 5 squares at a time.

4. Finally, I chain-piece.  Frankly, if I’m going to sit down and sew some triangles, I’d just as soon sew eight of them in a row. It’s not all that much more work than two. More on my preferred method of HST-making soon.

Truth be told, I sewed 11 pairs (22 total squares, since you’re making two at a time when you do half-square triangles) last Monday, the very first day.  In part because I was on a roll, and in part because I knew my mom was coming and my sewing time would be dramatically limited for the rest of the week.  True to my prediction, I did very little sewing again until Sunday night, when I knocked out 6 more pairs to end up slightly ahead for the week.  That made it through all of my red scraps, and got a start on my large pile of pinks.

This week looks like it will be all pink, all the time.  Apparently, I have a lot of pink.

If you’re keeping up with my initial idea of a pace, you should have 14 pairs, or 28 individual squares, done.  I am slightly ahead with 32, which will hopefully provide a buffer for when I inevitably fall behind.

So, what about you? Do you have a strategy going into this project? Are you choosing only certain colors, eliminating some from consideration, or are you just pulling at random?