TATW, with intent

Right after finishing the last N1C TATW, I pulled out the shoe box of several hundred N1C strips and grabbed all the pink/juvenile ones sitting on top. To those I added some green check, medium blue, a red, and whatever other light or mostly-white fabrics I could dig up until I had 210 strips to work with (35 blocks for a 5x7 layout). This will be a very random and mostly 'low volume' top, definitely for a child. This time I was going to iron, construct, and lay out every block the same. Would all the seams nestle then?

I had only two criteria: no samesies touching, and doubles were okay (just not side-by-side). In fact, due to the sheer volume of them, most blocks would need two strips of the green check. With that, I just reached into the box holding the jumble of strips and kept pairing a random strip to a green check, pairing and sewing until 210 strips were down to 105 pairs. The pairs got randomly sewn into segments of fours until 35 were made, then the remaining pairs were sewn onto those.

Only five blocks were constructed of six 16" strips. The rest were made up of what I refer to as "short stacks": 16+ inch-long strips in toto, but that length was made up of 2 or 3 segments, as above. Creating a final TATW block from these means lots of fits and starts, which really eats up any L&E project being sewn alongside.

The 80th (final) Shoo Fly block made it through my machine while I was less than halfway through my pile of TATW short stacks.

The little safety pin indicates a skinny seam is needed on that side as there's not a full 1/4" available.

(I'm a year behind in Bonnie's L&E challenge, but last summer I wasn't home with my machines and fabrics.) I wasn't ready to spend time figuring out a layout of the Shoo Fly blocks; rather than start a whole new L&E block or project, I decided to resurrect this one.

Somehow, at some time in my sporadic visits home between January 2021 and now, I managed to create 100 string rectangles, plan their layout, stash them all in a drawer, and remember where that drawer was. (Well, maybe I stumbled across them again recently while reacquainting myself with my studio.)

This will do nicely as a Leader-Ender project

but on closer examination I realized every set had a clip in a specific corner. I was sending myself a message from the past: I stacked these up with a layout in mind (I was trying to avoid secondary diamond patterns from similar fabrics, and didn't want samsies in the inner corners). I also vaguely remembered taking photos of the stacking process so I could unstack them in the right order. That was something I couldn't find--my photographic plan of construction.

So I made up a new one:

    1: Starting point, clip in upper left                                                    2: Open top two like a book:

 

3: Flip them up                                                                                               4: Open bottom two like a book

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So the TATW blocks are continuing apace and the design wall is filling up nicely behind me as I knock out at least 3 string blocks for every two TATW blocks I 'finish'.

Air quotes above because I'm not sewing the final strips yet to complete each block. I'm getting them to that point by unpicking each tube and making sure nothing got flipped or mixed up:

but then I'm carefully stacking each strip

and storing each stack, aligned the same and separated by a piece of paper, in a shoe box.

I'd rather concentrate on the short stack construction first. When that's complete and over with, I'll start sewing these together and placing them on the design wall all going in the same direction (the designated top square always in the same position). Maybe the question will be answered: can these block seams ever nestle?