Still Chipping Away At En Provence

Whew!  Yesterday on the home side I had laundry to do and on the quilt side needed to do some focus work on En Provence.  I emphasized needed because up to now working on En Provence has gone swimmingly but this week the wheels came off  the wagon!

I'm working (out of order) on Part 4 which is to make these Triangle-In-A-Square (or Tri-Recs) blocks.

Over  the weekend I had cut the center triangles for this part and also for Part 2 where the same units will be made with neutral centers and mauve side triangles.  Then I had cut the side triangles for this part.  What I didn't realize at the time was that's where the trouble began.

I had laid out my strips of purples layered anywhere from four to eight layers deep, all the strips right sides up then used the Tri-Recs side triangle ruler to cut them.  When done, I had a stack triangles that looked like this:

It was only after I started sewing  a bunch units earlier this week and then tried to add the second triangles that I discovered my mistake!  For the blocks you actually need to cut two triangles in reverse of each other.   The fabrics should have been layered with each set of two layers of fabric either right sides or wrong sides together.  Needless to say after all the cutting over the weekend, yesterday I had to go back and cut more,  this time with the fabrics all right side down to get triangles facing in the other direction so I would have this:

So out of all the triangles I initially cut, half of them are now useless!  Well, not totally useless.  It turns out I had cut one of the fabrics (the purple with the big polka dots seen in the first picture) with two  layers folded together so had a few reverse triangles in that fabric among the initial set of cuts.  Two of the other fabrics I'm using are batiks so some of the ones cut initially looked fine from the wrong side so could also be used as reverse triangles.  

I had already used up some of my fabrics during the first round of cuts so made sure to sew up the Tri-Recs units using all of those fabrics first since most of the reverse triangles are only cut from the remaining fabrics.   When I start putting the blocks for the mystery together, I hope the affect on the distribution of the fabrics in the finished Tri-Recs units won't be that evident.  I'm going to pick up a few purple fat quarters in the event I feel I need to sprinkle in a little more diversity (I also need to re-stock my purples now that I've used up so many).  If I do introduce new fabrics, it may also mean I'll have to make up some four patches with the new fabrics as well so they appear in those units too.

After all the panic and work yesterday, I managed to get all the Tri-Recs units I needed for this part of the mystery completed.  Fortunately this puts me back on track with this project and I've already put a note with Part 2 to make sure I don't make the same mistake with the mauve ones!  As for all the leftovers? 

Either I'll make more Tri-Recs squares for another project (hmmm, a design opportunity?) or I might use them to make Split Rectangle blocks that can go on the back or be used in another quilt.  That's the great thing about quilting, even your mistakes don't have to go to waste!