After the last few complicated blocks, it was a relief to do something with simple rotary cutting and easy piecing.

This was originally going to be a July block for the “month of tiny triangles” (and boy, were these tiny), but I got so much done at retreat in April that it ended up being a May block instead. Rest assured, there are plenty of blocks with tiny triangles left to fill many future Julys.

And now that I’m starting to sash together adjacent blocks each month, I need to make sure that I have enough adjacent blocks to sash. So it was good to fill in this blank spot in the upper right corner of the quilt.

The block construction was kind of a non-event. Now that I’ve made so many blocks with tiny triangles (including some that were not made in July), they’re old hat. I barely even noticed they were small when I was stitching them together. And the back of the block surprisingly doesn’t have a crazy amount of bulk:

The trickier part of the block was not, in my opinion, the tiny triangles, but the large triangles at the corners of this diamond-in-a-square block. I have a little bit of history with this style of block, and was not looking forward to stitching on those last four triangles. But I think that it came out all right in the end; it’s definitely an improvement over that first diamond-in-a-square block I did seven years ago.

Slacking off after my productive retreat month, I only made this one Dear Jane block in May, plus I sashed two more blocks together (and attached them to another four already-sashed blocks), and completed 18 triangle motifs on the rainbow quilt:

I also made some progress on a rescue project this month. I acquired over 1000 half-square triangles (of somewhat varying sizes – the working theory is that they were the corners trimmed not-very-carefully off some snowball blocks) at my guild’s scrap exchange a few years ago. And now I’ve finally sewn them to each other to make over 500 small squares (only 16 of them pictured here):

Now I’m in the process of trimming all 500+ of them to a more uniform size with my new Bloc Loc ruler – a tedious process to be sure, but the ruler is helping me keep everything lined up as I trim these squares.

I noticed that they also have a Bloc Loc ruler that can be used for diamond-in-a-square blocks, and I think it would have come in handy for making sure this block was square. I’m pretty sure I still have half a dozen diamonds in the rough left to do on my Dear Jane quilt, so this ruler would be a wise investment. Anything to justify buying a new quilting tool!