Union Blues & Richmond Reds Ideas for Precuts

My Union Blues collection has been shipped to shops.

Look for yardage at your favorite store.

I've been doing a little sketching in EQ7,

thinking about Moda pre-cuts in the 5" system.

Surely someone's thought of this pattern before

Alternating blocks of rectangles

and four-patches

I thought about combining my two most recent

Civil War reproductions

Richmond Reds and Union Blues.

They both have a good range of darks and lights.

Probably the easiest way to set this would be to

combine the blocks in strips, one strip of rectangles,

one of four patches.

The hardest thing is to get the checkerboard alteration of dark and lights to work by

rotating the blocks on the design wall.

My inspiration was an antique quilt I saw online.

What if you turned the strips on the diagonal?

That's actually the way the vintage quilt was set.

Which makes it pretty wonderful.

And then there's the border on the original.

It's outrageous.

I haven't got a real pattern here. Just some ideas.

Start with squares. Cut some in half

Cut some in quarters

Piece them together.

You'll have to trim the rectangle squares to match the four-patches in size.

Make strips.

Play around.