Tossed Salad

Last night I began working on the design wall. The first thing I did was assess whether I had enough leftover fabric in each color group to make solo triangles, raiding my scraps for workable fabrics to fill any gaps. That done, there were a few color groups where the half square triangle units had two or three combinations of fabrics and I needed to figure out how to distribute them. My usual method has been to try to do it fairly evenly and symmetrically, and I intended to do just that.

Out of the blue I got the idea to just literally toss the units of a color group around like a salad to get them good and mixed up. It was kind of fun! Then I picked up the units in sets of four, not worrying about what order the combos were in. That should really help to achieve more randomness in the final layout.

Next I cut 3.5" squares for the solo triangle areas. My plan is to sew whole squares rather than triangles. As I attach the sailboat fabric, the seam will create triangles out of the squares, and I'll trim away the excess. It works in my head.

Moving forward, I followed my Organized Chaos map, laying out the upper left quadrant of Ocean Waves, seen below.

The units are all four layers deep, enough to make the upper left quadrants of four Ocean Waves blocks--each looking slightly different, thanks to the tossed salad method I used. The diagonal edges are the squares-that-will-become-triangles folded back. The Sailboat theme fabric will fill the large empty triangle areas.