The quilt was obviously on my mind during the night because when I got up this morning I knew I wanted to head to the fabric shop for some fabrics in a range of bright colours to use as the large “background” element for each block.

I have ended up with 1/3m of 25 different fabrics (6 fabrics from my stash).

Why so much fabric you wonder – well, I figured out the easiest (if most wasteful) way of building that large block is to start with a 12″ X 12″ square of the “background” fabric. Take the block I want to offset, trim a couple of corners off, then lay it on the 12″ X 12″ square.
I found if I pulled the block in 1/4″ from the top and left edges of the “background” fabric I can cut out the triangles needed to construct the large square (leaving me with a large piece of background fabric lying beneath the block as leftover, oh well – it’s large enough to use for something else).

Now I sew the background pieces to the block.

Once the triangles are sewn to the block it’s easy to trim it to 11″ and guess what – the pattern is aligned – had I figured that out yesterday I could have salvaged the fabric I ended up discarding.

Here are four blocks finished and trimmed to 11″ X 11″. You can see what I mean by “offset” and “background. Each block will be different except for the white with blue dot fabric framing the center square in each block. I’m thinking I will frame each of these 11″ X 11” blocks with a solid white (maybe a slightly off white) narrow frame, and then sash between the blocks. Although a very dark blue framing might work. I’ll have a better idea about what to do when I get all 25 blocks done – 20 for the quilt top, 5 for the quilt back.

So now I know what I’m actually doing, I can proceed to make up my inner square assembly for the remaining 21 blocks, cut out a 12″ square from each of the background fabrics, and full steam ahead! Yeah.