Experiments with patchwork triangles, and a cleanup.

For the fourth week of Leila's skills sampler workshop, she invited us to make up a design of our own using the skills she has taught us so far. At first I said no, I'm not creative enough - I can follow directions, but I'm not imaginative. Then I thought 'don't be a wimp', so I got some scraps of fabric out, cut them into triangles, joined them up into squares, and played around with them. I placed them into all sorts of combinations.. And this is what I settled on to stitch up. I didn't copy anything from a book or magazine, but I'm sure it's been done before. I just don't know what it is called! This is a failed experiment. Leila had provided a link to a video for us to try out if we wanted to. Instead of the traditional way of making triangle squares, this technique was a short cut. You place two squares of fabric face to face, sew them all around the edge, cut it in half diagonally, then cut diagonally again, and voila! four squares of triangles! Sounds great, doesn't it. But one has to be VERY careful with measuring, stitching and cutting, or one ends up with squares of different sizes like this!
While I was looking in my scrap stash for fabrics to play with, it was driving me crazy, because the box was just full of untrimmed bits. So I emptied the whole lot on the table and taking one piece at a time, cut them all into squares or rectangles, depending on the size of the piece. Then I sorted everything into sizes and colour ranges - bags of 2", 2-1/2", 5" and 6" squares. A bag of strips, and a pile of larger pieces which I didn't want to cute down too small in case they came in useful for something one day (like rug mugs or fabric postcards). A lot of fabric went into the bin and on the floor, but at least I now have USEFUL bits and not just tiny bits of rubbish!