Lots and lots of little squares

I have a love hate relationship with quilting sometimes. At times I really enjoy the mindless & repetitive tasks.... in particular cutting out the pieces and then grouping them by color & size. I love chain piecing, I'll sit there and pin a whole stack of pieces while watching TV then zoom zoom zoom zoom through my sewing machine. Then I snip & stack the pieces, snip & stack, snip & stack. Love it. But then of course at some point in the process I'll realize "good lord, I've got about 25 more steps before I have an actual quilt."

When it comes to handicrafts some people are process oriented -they don't really care how long it takes to finish a particular piece, they just enjoy the process of working on it, and others are product oriented - these are the folks who like to write lists & check things off. I'm probably about about 30% process oriented and 70% product oriented. I enjoy the process up to the point when I'm piecing the top and it starts to get big. Then the desire to have the finished quilt kicks in and I power through to the end.

I'm in the first 30% of my next few quilts at the moment, but don't have much to show yet.

Way back whenever I'd found this "Rachel's Baskets" quilt pattern in a book I think it was called "Relax & Quilt" (pattern by Marti Michell) and wanted to make it for my niece Rachel.

I had a rather healthy stash of calicoes leftover from my first quilt, so I started cutting out little 31/2" squares out of what I had... picked up a few pretty fat quarters and as time went by with this quilt still in the 'someday' stage I'd cut the scraps from my other quilts into 31/2" squares as well.

You can imagine, I ended up with lots and lots and lots of squares. Lots and lots and lots of little squares.

Well 'someday' kept getting pushed back and eventually my little baby niece was much more interested in Hannah Montana than in cutesy, pretty, little girly-girl calicoes. Oh well. I made her another quilt and was left with all these little squares.

Now, I loves me some scrappy quilts, and am currently curled up under my very first calico quilt, but my tastes are changing and I really want to start transitioning my stash more into the batik world. But in order to do that I need to mentally and physically start clearing out some space.

To that end... all these little squares have to go someplace. I've got two ideas in mind.

1. A pink pinwheel quilt... I'm thinking lap-sized (or you know baby-quilt sized if any of my friends would actually have a GIRL for a change - I've made about 9 or 10 baby quilts and all but 1 were for boys!)

2. A calico / white half square triangle quilt something like this one from an appropriately named quilt blog "squares & triangles" :

And to that end I've been making little half square triangles like a mad-woman.

Matching and pinning.

Sewing and snipping.
Flipping and pressing.

Ah... and when you flip 'em and press 'em open you get the wonky little tabs at the corners. I guess I could leave them in, but then the seems would be thicker than necessary... gotta square 'em up.

Snipping and sorting.

So that's what I've been working on. And I'm at the point where I'm getting a weee bit tired of the repetitiveness and thinking "good lord I've got 25 more steps to go!" But I guess it's all part of the process.