Another Quilt Show Team Challenge

At our quilt show meeting in December, our leader, Cindy, gave each of us a half yard of a Bella Solid from Moda. Luckily, she let us each pick the color we wanted. I had a hard time choosing and finally settled on Cobalt Blue. I used it in the above alternate blocks for the triangles.. All the other fabrics are from my stash. I chose the sage like green for the other alternate triangles because I had a lot of it and I also liked how it went with the blue. I'll have to order more of the blue. I'll need 35 blocks total, each block will finish at 8 1/2" for a 42.5" x 59.5" quilt. Luckily, too, Cindy didn't give any other rules than to use the fabric in a quilt. The finished quilts will be shown in the 2014 show.  Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle will be our speakers that year so I think the idea was to do something a little more modern but that isn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to go more Amish style. I hope to get the top done quickly because I want to hand quilt it and I don't want to be working on it near the deadline like I did with this years team challenge quilt. That's my goal, anyway. ; c )

What do you think of the black? I wasn't going to use it or the red at first. I think the black helps to ground it.

According to my block book, this is the Courthouse Square block. I've been enjoying all the Granny Square quilts so many quilt bloggers are doing now and this is similar. I took some photos as I worked. I like constructing one block at a time. There may be faster ways to do it. This just works for me.

For the triangles I cut 5" and 3" strips. For setting triangles I used the 5" strips and cut 5" blocks then cut on the diagonal both ways. I didn't take a photo of the corner triangles. For those I cut 3" squares and cut just once on the diagonal.

 Here is my sewing layout. The squares are cut 2 1/2".

Sewn into diagonal rows. 

Then the rows are sewn together. I purposely make the triangles larger than I need them and trim. 

 Trimming up the block, making sure I have 1/4" beyond the points.

A 9" block.

I'm trying to pay more attention to my surroundings as I walk my dog every morning. One day last week I was looking way up into my neighbors trees and spotted a very large bird in a tulip poplar. I'm pretty sure it's a hawk. We see them every now and then. They are impressive birds. Wish I'd seen it fly off.