Block Evolution

In my last post, I showed this house block which is the first block in a mystery quilt by Kathleen Tracy.

Step 2 called for surrounding the house block with half square triangles.  The first decision for me was whether to put the triangle's dark side or light side closest to the house.  I turned to my trusty Electric Quilt software to get a visual.

Not knowing what the  next step of the mystery will be, I decided to put the lighter blocks on the outside, thinking they will be easier to coordinate with whatever comes next.

Next decision was what colors to use?  I had some brown triangles leftover from a previous project so I started there:

Didn't really like the brown, so I tried out some greens:

Better than the brown, but still not quite right.  Tried a few more options, until I found this blue/gray fabric that really seemd to work with the colors in the house:

The scrappy quilter in me wanted to mix things up, so I thought I would use multiple fabrics for the tan in the background:

Now we're getting somewhere!  Could I also mix it up with the blues?  I searched every scrap of my Civil War repro stash and came up with an array of blues.    Would the house fabrics be able to stand out against them?

Perhaps it could work, if I was careful with the placement of the blues closest to  the house.  I cut up some triangles and played around until I thought it looked good.

Keeping my fingers crossed, I began to sew it together, and it ended up looking like this:

I'm very happy with it.  This step could have been done with two fabrics and some shortcut techniques to make half square triangles,  but half the fun was just playing in the fabric stash. After all, isn't that what you're supposed to do with a fabric stash?

Wonder what Step 3 will be?