Let’s talk about Grackle Party.  I’ve shared some individual blocks, but not my design for it.  Well, design hope, since only the design of the center is really set in stone now.  I did talk a little about how it started in this post, basically as a reintroduction to sewing after having my fourth child.  Grackle Party is going to be a wall-hanging, though how large it’ll be is still uncertain.

I was looking through some pictures from before my move and hope they’ll help illustrate.

I went with the center square design and cut more mitered frames in the same size and bigger ones to go around it.  I figured only the center square would have a complicated pieced center, since I really didn’t want to bother with more and it was a good focal point.  The fabric from Spoonflower also came in a larger print size, which was perfect for the insides of these squares.

Then I decided that having double mitered frames would look weird and would be too annoying to EPP, so I alternated the mitered frames with straight frames with cornerstones.  Below you can see an example of each of the two blocks.

On the left is the mitered frame inside.  On the right, the mitered frame is outside.  The small block above them with the big frame might go into the border.  I thought I’d put the bigger framed blocks on point with scrappy neutrals between and then border it with the smaller framed squares, floating in the background.  At the bottom, you can see that I was toying with the idea of adding a colored bit in the center of the neutral areas.  I’ll come back to that in a future post.

The math to make it all fit was annoying, and I didn’t really like the border idea.  So, I stopped thinking about the border at this point and put all of those parts away and focused on the center (essentially square-in-a-square) nine blocks.

You’ve been seeing those blocks as I finish them, and I have more to show you in the coming weeks, especially if I can find more of the planning pictures form before the move.