MAD piecing for March

 While I was assembling the pink and brown quilt I was also working on my Hourglass units. I want to clear away some of the grey fabric littering every surface, and that means I needed to cut a heap of 3.5" squares from them first. Every square makes 4 triangles, equal to one block, so if I cut 50 squares I knew that I had enough triangles for 50 blocks. It didn't take all that long to cut that first 50, so I buckled down and cut another 50, and then I tidied up the scraps. Before I knew it I had enough squares for 135 Hourglass units.

They don't look like much, but they were pretty labour intensive, what with the sewing, pressing and trimming. I had two long sessions of nothing else but feeding them through the machine, and did the ironing and trimming over a couple of days.  Then I packed them all away with their brothers and sisters in the project box,which is getting pretty full now. I tallied it all up, and I now have 667 little blocks finished, just 134 to go. I think I'll work in smaller batches from now on. And work with colours that aren't so drab and gloomy.

I pulled out the scrappy bars that I was working on last year. It didn't need many more strips to make it into a decent size quilt, so I'm pretty sure it can be a quick finish. 

I was a bit horrified when I went to the drawer containing the scrap ends of strips. I've been adding to it constantly, and there was way more than I thought. I'm going to enjoy going through all these little bits, remembering the projects they came from. There are some really lovely fabrics in this lot.

I will have plenty of scraps to finish this quilt, plus enough to start building the next one. I don't want to make the same thing again, so it will involve a bit of hunting through my books and Pinterest searches for ideas. It might be fun to do something in a block format next time, so I can keep using the pieces as I cut them, not letting them build up into a massive pile again.