The very next day . . .

I've already got half my blocks made!  Here's my little stack of the 11 blocks I've made so far, each cut into quarters:

I couldn't resist playing around with my very first block.  Here it is whole:

Then I cut it into quarters:

And rearranged them, turning some on their sides:

Pretty cool how that changes the look completely, huh?  I think it will look even better when I've got all my blocks to play with, so the prints will be more mixed up.

Mostly so I can remember in the future how I did this, I'm going to record it here:

1)  I started with 50 different pieces of 10" x 10" fabric (two of which were only half pieces).  I cut each into four squares of 5" x 5".

2)  I then made 4 piles, each pile containing one piece of each fabric.  I separated these piles into smaller piles by color.

3)  I counted how many pieces I had of each color in one pile.  I had mostly blue and pink fabrics, along with some yellow, green and purple.  I decided that each nine-patch block should have three blues, three pinks, and one each of the other colors.

4)  Keeping my pile separated by color, I started pulling fabrics to make up the nine-patch blocks until I'd used up all the pieces from the first pile.  Then I did the same for the second pile.  I didn't have space left to lay out the blocks for the third and fourth piles, so I'll do those next time.

5)  My plan is to make up all my blocks and cut them into quarters.  Then I'll lay them all out and start taking one quarter block from each and place them in rows.  That should make my fabrics nicely spaced.  We shall see!