Word has gotten around my quilt guild that I’m always looking for suitable fabric for this quilt, especially that light sage green color, which is so hard to find these days. I showed up at a guild board meeting a few months ago and the guild President handed me a plastic bag full of treasure (a.k.a. quilting fabric scraps), including some beautiful silvery light green scraps with leaves on them.

I wanted to use them in a block (or preferably two), but they really were scraps. I think the biggest piece was 7″ x 3″. So, I needed to plan carefully to make full use of them in my quilt.

First I took an inventory: carefully measuring and making notes on the size of each scrap.

Then I pulled out the index cards for each of the blocks slated for light green that I hadn’t completed yet. I eliminated a few right off the bat, because they called for more/wider pieces than I had (most of the scraps were short strips, e.g. 10″ x 1.5″). This left me with eight possible candidates:

At that point it was like working a puzzle. There were probably lots of different ways the pieces for some combo of blocks could be cut out of the scraps: I just needed to work out which was the best one for me.

So I spent a bunch of time considering the size and number of pieces that were needed for each block, how the shapes of the pieces would show off (or not) the leaf design of the fabric, and where the blocks were positioned on the quilt (I didn’t want to have two of the same fabric right next to each other).

Once the decision was made, I also had to scan the new fabric and import it into the software, so I could update my design with the new fabric placement. I have to re-remember how to do it every time. A smart person would take notes that they could reference next time, but where would be the fun in that?

[Note to self for next time: you have to save the scanned fabric as a 200 x 200 pixel .bmp file in “C:\My Documents\My Dear Jane\fabs”, then open the Fabric Library for your project, click Import and choose your new image, and finally, click the Copy button. The image disappears from the library, and somehow that makes it available for use in your project.]

All in all, the pre-planning for this block took far longer than the actual construction. The center section is just a nine-patch block made out of diamonds instead of squares. Then you add four wedge-shaped pieces around the sides to square it up. Those last two diamonds are appliquéd on instead of pieced like the others, which really shows off how lumpy my appliqué skills are.

Careful cutting left me with enough scraps to make one of the triangle blocks with this fabric later. Now I just have to decide which triangle block to make. Good thing I love a puzzle.