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.

Stringing along

This year's Bonnie Hunter Mystery is the fourth year I've played along.  While I loved making Allietare, En Provence, and On Ringo Lake, I'd always hoped that Bonnie would revisit the string blocks that she used in mystery quilts of old.
And hooray hooray - this year's the year!
Clue #4 dropped on Friday morning, and not only did it involve string blocks, but it involved making orange string blocks!
Oh, bliss!

There's just one teensy-tiny problem.
String piecing is just so...  so... untidy.
(If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of People Who Are Extremely Stingy and People Who are Anal-Retentive, you would find me in the overlap.)  (I'm not kidding.)

So I gave the process a lot of thought and decided on a way that made the least waste and the least mess.  I'm probably violating the spirit of stringness here, but so it goes.
Grabbing the stack of old phone books that my dad had just that morning added to the kindling pile (good thing I was paying attention since I'd forgotten to tell him I wanted them), I started cutting and marking pages.
This page is going to give me six of those pretty little orange string blocks.

And here is where you can see me in action, in all my OCD glory.

Instead of starting the first strip in the center and working out from there, I lined up the edge of the fabric and the edge of the paper.  Perfectly.  Because of course I did.

Surprisingly, I can actually sew crooked strips on after that first one without twitching.  But that first one...

Here you can see I'm bearing down on the red line that I marked on my paper.  (You can see both red lines in the photo of my prepped paper above)  That line is where the block unit will be cut, so I know I have to watch out here and allow a wide enough strip that the seam allowances stay out of the seam allowances, if you know what I mean.

It's clear in this next photo, where that solid orange strip is in the middle of the strip set - it's wide enough to allow lots of leeway.  The strip on the right is where I trimmed on the other red line, and that little strip will be used in the next block.

Here's a view of the back where you can see just how stingy I am.  This is how I trim as I sew, so there's a minimum of waste.

We all have our little quirks...

Once the paper was covered and trimmed to size, I sliced it into thirds

and then cut them in half to yield six string-pieced units.

And then I did a bunch more!

I started to throw out these leftover bits of paper that had been trimmed off the end of each set of blocks, but then realized if I saved them, I wouldn't have to count all those little blocks - all I have to do is count these papers and multiply by six!  Given the troubles I've had with block-counting lately, this seems like a good plan.

Adding these clue #4s to the bin (and including the chevrons that I've got on the pressing board waiting to be flattened), I've now got a bit more than half of the units I'll need for each clue.

I'll carry on making more of all these, using them as leader/enders for my other sewing.  Onwards and upwards!  And stringing all the way...

Linking with Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap, and with Quiltville's Clue Four Linky Party.  Oh the scraps that you'll see!