On the day I started this block, Facebook reminded me of a quilting memory from one year ago: The Halfpenny block. After finishing the piecing for that block, I photographed it with a penny sitting in the center, to illustrate how tiny the triangles in the block really were:

Now here I am, almost exactly one year later, piecing a block with even tinier triangles. Clearly I’m drawn to blocks with tiny triangles each July.

I usually jot down some ideas ahead of time for each block, so I have some idea of what I’m going to write about when I finish the block. This time, all I had was “I can’t figure out why some blocks are marked as advanced difficulty – is it the tininess of the triangles? We’ll see when I start to piece it.”

After piecing the block together, I do believe that the tiny pieces were the main reason for its advanced difficulty rating, but the fact is, they weren’t too difficult. Maybe all this practice at “piecing tiny” is improving my skills.

In fact, the most difficult aspect of this block for me was cutting everything out. The green fabric has a subtle green stripe, with a “stripe” of red dots going the opposite direction, and I wanted to be consistent in the direction of the stripes across the block.

I ended up deciding I wanted a pinwheel effect, with the top left and bottom right triangles going one direction, and the top right and bottom left going the other.

But I was cutting the pieces out in a hurry and kept ending up with triangles where the stripes go the wrong way. I’d start pinning the next triangle on and realize that it wasn’t going to work, and have to cut out another.

So, I’ve got a few extra green triangles left over. I’ll have to see which other blocks I’m planning to make with this fabric – hopefully I can use those green triangles somewhere. At least the extra pieces are for the bigger triangles in the corners, not the tiny ones in the center. They’re more likely to be big enough to use in something else.

And yes, these triangles are even tinier than last July’s halfpenny triangles. Here’s a picture of this block with accompanying penny:

I had to put the penny off to the side, because if I centered it, then the center square and the smallest triangles were totally eclipsed by the coin. The smallest triangles in this block are about 3/8″ on the short sides, compared to 1/2″ on July 2017’s block.

Looking back through my blog articles, in July 2016 I was just starting the project, and wrestling with my first triangular pieces (although much larger triangles back then). I’m not sure if there’s any pattern to how I decide when to do which blocks. Is it just coincidence, or is July really the month of tiny triangles?