Another Courthouse

I made three large quilts with the blocks from the 2018-2019 Quilt Etc. Great American Read block-of-the-month class: one for Festival of Trees, one for the hospital quilters, and one for my niece. The leftover scraps from those quilts were long, thin pieces, less than two inches wide. I made 6” pineapple blocks with the Christmas-colored scraps. You can’t go wrong with pineapple blocks, and they show off red and green particularly well. With the Fig Tree scraps, I made 6” courthouse step blocks, for no other reason than I’d never done it before. But the more blocks I made, the less I liked them. They were busy, pointless noise, like my scrap bag vomited on the design wall. They seemed to be destined for the “what was I thinking” pile. But then I thought of using negative blocks as intermediaries, with white centers instead of black. The result is this odd phantom checkerboard effect, which makes me quite happy.