First and foremost, a congrats to Laurel, the winner of our Sew Fresh Fabrics solid charm pack giveaway.  Random.org decided that she was lucky number 36!

I’ve been hard at work on my stack of flimsies this past week. Two are quilted, one is completely bound, and the other is part of the way there.

But I needed a break from the hand-sewing and wasn’t mentally or physically ready to crawl on the floor and baste the third, so I jumped right in and started piecing together my half-square triangle blocks.

Due to the joy of chain-piecing (seriously, I have a problem, I almost refuse to make something if I can’t chain-piece it), five blocks came together in no time.  It goes even faster when you realize that the block is totally symmetrical, so you can make two outer rows and two inner rows kind of at the same time.  Anyways, what I’m saying is, it goes fast.

With my 4.5″ (unfinished) squares, these blocks end up at a generous 16.5″ square. It’s nice to have it work up so big, and so fast, since the HSTs themselves took so darn long.  Of course, five blocks (I plan on 20, plus some borders) only used up 80 of my 400+ squares, so I still have a ways to go.

This level of scrappiness requires something a big leap of faith for me.  I didn’t weed out any fabrics, I didn’t go into it with a particular color scheme.  It’s just… everything.  So, as I start to put the blocks together, there are some downright weird fabric pairings going up next to each other.  I don’t look at a completed block and fall in love.  But the magic of a scrappy quilt is when you see the finished product as a whole.  Somehow the complete randomness (with some nice white space to break it up) ends up working a crazy kind of fabric alchemy and looking good when it’s all put together.

Or, so I’m telling myself.

In the meantime, I’m trying to put these blocks together with as little thought as possible. Just grabbing one after the other out of the box of random-y random goodness, reserving the veto only for when two near-identical colors try to get next to each other.  I will likely do the same when I put the rows and the top together, and not just because I don’t have the space to lay them all out ahead of time.  I’m trying to really let random be random.

Let’s hope it all works out, in the end.