After sewing the second of eight strip sets for my current Work-in-Progress, I had a small “aha!” moment (although maybe it should be called a “duh!” moment). You’ll remember from my last post that I’m working with a Jelly Roll, in this case 40 2½”-wide strips of fabric from Lily Ashbury’s “High Street” line . . .

. . . to make a quilt called Tea Time. The pattern by Larene Smith describes a clever way of sewing strip sets into tubes and cutting the tubes into triangles which open up to yield squares. The squares are then joined together to make a scrappy quilt.

Each strip set is made with five fabrics. Because of the manner in which the triangles are cut after being sewn into a tube, the blocks come out in one of two ways. The first way is a block containing (predictably) five strips, with the middle strip running through the center of the block, like this one . . .

I’m calling the ones cut this way the A blocks.

The B blocks contain six strips, because the middle strip gets cut in half and each half ends up on the outer edges of the block. There’s a seam bisecting the block, like this one:

Initially I had been quite spontaneous in choosing my strip sets, just wanting to make sure each set had a pink, yellow, orange, green, and grey strip. I assumed that the strip in the number 3 position would be in the middle of the block. It is — but as you can see from the photos above, that applies to only half the blocks. It didn’t dawn on me right away that the fabrics in the 1 and 5 positions would wind up in the middle of the block in the other half. Hello!

Armed with this new knowledge, I took a second look at my arrangement of remaining strip sets — in particular the fabrics in the 1 and 5 positions — and wound up rearranging them. Several times. So much for spontaneity!

Here are my final fabric combinations:

(These strips were cut from the end of the tubes after the triangles were cut and I had opened up the last seam.)

This is such a delicious combination of fabrics. You know what comes to mind when I look at these colors? Rainbow sherbet. Blackberry sorbet. Green tea ice cream. That led to my second “aha” moment: I’m going to name this quilt Ice Cream Social.