granny squares a-multiplyin'

I put these away for a while in preference for knitting, which is more portable. Hard to take a sewing machine on vacation, it turns out. I also ended up starting and finishing another quilt top with brighter, prettier fabrics that distracted me last week. But last night I had a hankering to keep piecing rather than deal with backing and basting so I found my tote bag full of granny squares-to-be.

I was happy with past self for neatly organizing all of the strip sets into the groups for blocks rather than just shoving them all out of sight. That meant I could easily lay everything out and start stacking pieces for - you guessed it - chain piecing! I had already finished the task of sewing the individual strips together and slicing them crosswise. That's quite a bit of the work, actually, so all I need to do now is match and sew these into the final granny square blocks. Here's one I tested out before the hiatus:

The contrast between rounds isn't as much as I'd like in this one, but I'm confident the others will do nicely. This one will be a quieter block surrounded by its rowdy cousins. As for the rowdy cousins, I got through about half of the blocks with another eight to go.

I really enjoy patterns that take simple shapes and turn them into more complicated blocks in creative ways. These all started out just from long strips of fabric; I didn't have to sew all those little squares together! Sadly, there is no way to shortcut trimming and squaring up blocks. There will be a lot of that to do once I get the rest of these blocks done.