New year, new RSC project

I treated myself to a book for Christmas -

because I had fallen in love with this quilt.

(Well, actually I love all the quilts in the book and I expect I'll be making at least a few of them.)  (At least.)

But for now, I'm in love with Sand Castles.  It hits all the high points for me -
1. String piecing.  I've been wanting to do a string-pieced project for quite a while now, and this one looks like a good way to get my feet wet.
2.  Four-patches.  I've been making four-patches for leader/enders for years and have buckets of them on hand.  Always looking for a fun way to use four-patches!
3.  The individual blocks are a perfect venue for RSC colors.  The four-patches are random, but the squares and triangles to set them with are a perfect fit for the color of the month.
4.  Gabillions of itty bitty pieces to sew together.  That's gotta be my favorite thing ever!

Let's take this little beauty for a test drive.
I string pieced a couple of squares

and sliced them diagonally.

And, as usual, I was irked by how much waste there is in this method.  All those raggedy edges being sliced off and tossed because they're too small to be useful.  (I've whined about discussed this issue before.)  If only there was a better way, where all those square-ended strips could be efficiently utilized.

And then I had a thought.  What if?

and I lined up what I had so far and grabbed my trusty ruler.

And then I cut a long narrow strip of paper and started piecing.

I cut off a triangle and compared it to one of the half-squares that I'd made earlier.

Looks like a match to me!

So, off I go with my happy little strings.  I can still make the regular squares when I've got some too-short strings to use for this strip method, but this way pleases my mingy little heart.  If I end up with a seam in an awkward place, a little corrective surgery (cut here, add there) will soon set me on my way again.

And now since I had a few stringy triangles done and some four-patches near at hand, how could I help but make a test block?

Yes, of course it's orange.

I just checked Angela's blog and the color for January is red.  Thanks to Good Fortune, I've got a bunch of red strips right here handy on the cutting table.  I'm going to kit up some red blocks and see how many I can get put together by the end of the month.

Speaking of Good Fortune, Bonnie dropped another clue on New Year's Day.   I ran to the sewing machine and stitched a few up.

I tried laying out some of the bits we've made so far, but I couldn't get a sense of where we're going with this.

 (And I didn't even get any of those crazy clue#5 quarter-square units into the mix.)

I'm just baffled, I tell ya.  So many pieces in so many sizes.
Baffled.