I finished sewing the strip pairs, then cut out the diamonds and when I laid them out this is what I had – definitely DULL!

First Layout

I do believe even if I had set up the strip pairs differently my outcome would have been the same – too many lights and darks and very few medium. The colour differences turned out to be much too subtle to allow me to do anything more with them.

Possible Substitutes

I felt I needed to add more colour – I grabbed some Grunge fabrics and some Fossil Fern to brighten the layout…

Definitely Brighter

I found myself removing the light diamonds and substituting the other fabrics – this is my layout for the moment. From here, I need to pick up the diagonal rows, and press all the pieces before sewing those rows together. I should also add another row to the bottom so that my row ends with full diamonds on the two bottom corners (at the moment I’m place holding with half diamonds – I have enough light diamonds that I pulled out to move pieces around and reinsert 10 diamonds. That will allow me half diamonds on all the edges with the corners being the ones belonging to the set.

The other question I’m pondering is whether to try finding another fabric in a very different colour for a central focus – I don’t have one at this point. I’d intended the turquoise to be my focal colour but with all the other colours now added that’s not happening. I could make one large turquoise diamond but I think it would overpower the rest, particularly since there aren’t clusters of very small diamonds in the array (which I really don’t want to do) to offset the ones I have.

I also ave no idea what fabric to use for the border half diamonds! Should it blend? Should it contrast? I have lots of turquoise Grunge – my original thoughts were to use that for the bordering, but now I’m not so sure. I may have to shop for a dark dots fabric that will blend with what I have; pretty sure I don’t want anything too bright.

I’ll simply carry on for now, pressing and assembling the diagonal rows….