Working with scraps

This is the final block of Pam Buda's  Pocket Patchwork sew along.  The theme for this sew along has been to use up orphans and leftovers from other projects to make a small quilt from scraps.  Here is this week's block:

How's that for cute?  A 4 1/2" Courthouse Steps block with lots of different fabrics.   Thankfully, Pam provided a template for paper piecing this one. 

This was a great opportunity to find a home for little scraps and tidy up the yardage.  I gathered up the small pieces I had already created when making the first 3 blocks, and sorted those into lights and darks.

I still needed to cut from yardage, so I sorted through my fabrics and chose the ones that had odds and ends poking out along one edge.

I lined up the odd bits,

and cut my new strips from the excess.

This helped to neaten up the edges of my scraps before they got folded up and put back into the bin with the other fabrics.

After I had my fabrics all cut, I decided where I wanted them to go and starting sewing.  The paper piecing went fairly smoothly, but about halfway in I realized that I had switched the position of the lights and the darks.  Instead of this:

I had this:

I decided to finish the errant block, hoping it would still work out, but  I didn't like the result.  It looked more rectangular than square, so I went back to the drawing board, (or should I say "back to the cutting mat")  and I made the block all over again.

Here are the 4 blocks I have made so far:

Next week we'll see how Pam has us put them all together into a small quilt.