Nine Ladders

With good quilt fabric selling at $12 per yard or more, it’s hard to toss any of it in the bin. When I’ve finished a quilt top I like to slice up the leftover scraps into useful shapes. If the scraps are long and thin they might become a string quilt or a series of log cabin blocks. It’s fun to transform messy piles of irregular scraps into neat little stacks of 2.5” squares. I line the stacks near my sewing machine so I can stitch them into 4” finished two-patch blocks in the breaks between other projects. You’ll see these two-patches in nearly everything I make, either as parts of larger blocks or as cornerstones between them. Today I’m pairing them with 4” finished half-square triangles to make a pattern that’s been around since before the Revolutionary War. The finished product should be lovely – if I can get all the triangles to face the right way.