what am I doing?

In preparation for the North Jersey MQG tomorrow night - since my cohort won't be there to do most of the talking, I figured I might come up with a flexible set of simple units to show, that could be arranged numerous ways. Then people could do whatever they wanted to do with them.  Easier said than done.

Here's the problem: I never know what I'm going to do until I do it. And then I never remember what I did because in most cases, I don't want to repeat anything exactly.  When I wrote my book, I had to work more deliberately and break things down into steps: a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

This was my Lonely Crayon block for the MQG challenge - but I could never replicate it and wouldn't want to. Three colors, one of which had to be white. I used squares and rectangles and have no idea how I got here.

Nonetheless, I started to experiment this morning to see if there were any possibilities working with just squares. And I am taking pictures as I go along, writing(here) as I go so I will (maybe) remember what I have done/am doing.  This is my test case: where better to test things than a place I can look at them in before/during/after sequence.

1. pick 3 fabrics - dark, medium light and cut three 4" squares of each color (12 total) 

2. cut three strips of each color, 1" wide x 4" long

3. lay different color strip roughly in the middle of the square and slice without a ruler along the edge of the strip. 4.  Insert and repeat with all squares and strips.

You will end up with 12 units that look something like this, with 6 pairs of color combinations.

One possible 9 patch layout (boring)

 Another possible layout (predictable)

Since I had cut 12 squares and used only 9, I sliced the extra three crosswise and then strung them together.  As you might imagine, too structured for me - but somebody else might like this arrangement.  (note to self- write instructions for this).

5.  Slice three units crosswise at any point (into any number of strips) and sew together, lining up the center strips as much as possible.

Ok - so now I am going to tackle the rest of the strips to see if I can come up with anything different. Stay tuned.** ** Footnote: I hated this so much that I cut all the pieces to bits and threw them into my box.  Maybe it was the colors, maybe the geometric, structured look - but these pieces will surface in something else more interesting. Whew! What a relief to be done with this.  If anybody wants to use this as a starting point and do something wonderful, be my guest.  But you have to send it to me to post:-).