A fun day

It's so funny where a day can take you, creatively speaking.  I started out working on my Skill  Builder BOM blocks for February.  Honestly I wasn't a huge fan of the "Em Dash" block, but I went ahead and made it and hung it up on my design wall. 

As I stood staring at it, I realized that the thing I DID like about the block was the little white triangles. So, I wondered, what would happen if I switched the positive and negative spaces. I went back to the cutting table, made some more squares (in reverse this time) and then sewed this one up. And I liked it!

Then my mind really started going a million miles an hour. If I like a block, I then usually wonder "What would this look like in a quilt - set with many similar blocks?"  So I hopped on the computer (thank you EQ4) and laid out this.

Now things were clicking! This quilt looked like a couple of different things I had "pinned" on my sewing ideas Pinterest page.  Specifically, if you start playing and rotate some of the blocks, you get a quilt that looks very similar to one by Andie Johnson that was shown on the Modern Quilt Guild page a while back. Here's my EQ4 version:

I also re-discovered a bow-tie quilt by Anna Joy of the The Joy Cottage that is made with a similar block. It just has smaller corner triangles. Here is my EQ4 version:

This is not rocket science, and obviously many other people have figured this out before I did. I just got excited when I took a block that I didn't like, turned it in to one I did like, and then put 2 + 2 together and had an "Ah Ha!" moment. Thank you for letting me share. Happy weekend. I'm headed back to the sewing table to sew up the next BOM block.