Scrappy Strip Quilt Progress - Choosing a Layout

After a nice long weekend with all of my children in one place (which is becoming a rare thing), I returned to my sewing room to see just how much work the quilting fairies did while I was away. What!? Nothing? That just means there is more fun for me.

There are still plenty of strips to sew together. I'm finding this to be quite therapeutic. It makes me almost giddy to put two of the most unlikely candidates side by side and sew them together. Take that you fabric strip. Bet you never thought you would be sewn next to this guy. Hahahaha (that is my evil laugh...just go with it, okay?).

I have sorted the strips by length to reduce the waste of dangly longer pieces. Once a set is sewn together, I cut them into 3 1/2" strip sets. For the blocks, I'm using the instructions from Bonnie Hunter's Diamond Strings quilt.

I set aside a bin to hold all of the blocks and now I have enough to figure out a layout. I found a great link over on Pinterest for half square triangle quilt layouts. I took four favorites and gave them a test run.

First up is a layout that has a jewel box feel to it.

Second is this layout that has a repeating ohio star throughout.

Third is a layout that gives the strips a chevron look.

And last is this vertical layout of slanted parallelograms.

The winner is... the first layout. The strippy scrappy triangle add a level of busyness that calls for a larger design and the jewel box gives it just that. Your eye has a place to rest while still yielding a bright and colorful quilt.

For the next little bit I'll keep sewing strips together to see just how big this quilt is going to be. And you know what...taking all of my scraps and sewing them into beautiful quilts is doing something I didn't expect. It's making more scraps! There is something really wrong with that. At some point, there are going to be pieces small enough to throw away. Not yet, though! I already have ideas for these new scraps.