New Quilt Underway!

While working on the mini mystery project, I wanted to get something else under my needle, to keep the quilting going.  A few weeks ago, when moving the stash in the new cabinets and organizing the Studio, in general, I came across a project box. 

It contained yardage and 10 inch pre-cut squares waiting to be designed and stitched into a long overdue special project. The pre-cut squares came in a range of shades and tones of one hue and needed some refining. I started the process by piling it all over the sewing table, along with 1 piece of yardage that would be my constant fabric in all the blocks.

Some of the tones were entirely too muted and fell way to close to another color to be included in this quilt - shown in the upper left corner.  Viewing the collection in black & white, it shows a lot of medium values, one or two brighter, slightly lighter values and a few dark values. The constant fabric is between medium and dark.  The other constant fabric is truly light and will provide all the needed contrast. 

Edited down, the fabrics give me a nice, if somewhat tight range of color values.

The design was quick, a few mathematical calculations, a sketch and the sewing commenced. I need 81 blocks in total, 41 focus blocks and 40 alternate blocks. So far, I'm up to 26 and 12 blocks respectively. The actual layout of the blocks will be fun to play with and the quilting will be very straight forward.  

One quick word on pre-cuts. I normally don't buy them. If I do, it's usually jelly rolls or strips, not the squares. And the below picture shows you why. I needed to prewash the fabric because of the color and even though, they were handled with care, this is what I ended up with.  

Yes, this will definitely change the amount of fabric the square will yield. ARGH! The blocks for the new quilt will continue to stack up while I ponder the final layout of the mini mystery.