Becky at Quilted twins showed a top she'd finished in her 'green series' of quilts she's making and  it uses a block that I played with last year. I don't know a name for it, so I've been calling it a framed nine patch. 

For some reason I have sooo many green scraps and I have struggled to finally use them all up, but it seems impossible. I made Bonnie Hunter's  Nifty Thrifty quilt from green and maroon scraps and that block is very similar to this one, but it uses two different widths of strips in quite a clever arrangement.

I used 1 3/4" strips for my block and it resulted in a 6 1/4" finished size, so it was pretty cute. They went together so fast it was unbelievable and I didn't want to stop making them, so I didn't. I've continued to make them on and off and plan to keep going until I amass enough for another top. I think I'll set one straight, and another with sashing....who knows. I've always been fascinated by quilters like Tallulah Bottoms  who had certain patterns that they made again and again, and always had pieces cut out for more. There are so many ways to arrange pieced blocks that we can make vastly different looking quilts just by varying the setting scheme. 

I was making these blocks out of scrap browns and greens and thought I had a couple. When I put them on the design wall to photograph for this post I discovered there were 15. It was like the quilt fairies had made them....but I know it's just me being so forgetful I can't remember what I was doing.

I decided to set the green blocks on point, with an alternate plain block so that the green seems to float in a nice airy way.

Then I wanted to use some more of the scrap strips up so I pieced a border of squares on point to surround the blocks. The blocks were on point too, so to calculate the borders I needed to count how many squares in each block along each side and make the borders that size, plus a few more for turning the corners. 

I nearly came undone because I wanted to have a small cream border and was going to cut it 1 3/4" too. Ha! maths was trying to trick me! I needed to cut it the width of the diagonal of the finished 1 2/4" square, plus seam allowance.  Then everything fitted beautifully. I had to attach the cream border first and then the pieced one, because I've tried to piece them together in the past before I fitted each side, and it won't work, people! I do occasionally learn from the mistakes of my past.

I love how fresh and clean this combination of green and cream looks, and the little squares marching around the edge. Some tops are just happy from start to finish, and this was one of them.

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