All squared up

While working on Long Time Gone, I was also making blocks for a Kathleen Tracy mystery quilt called Coming Home.  The next clue in Kathleen's mystery quilt was to make lots of scrappy little Square-in-a-square blocks.

To begin making these blocks, I sorted through all my fabrics and put together pairs that I liked, deciding later which would be the center square and which would be the surrounding triangles.

Then, I cut what I needed and sewed up these cute little square-in-a-squares units:

As it happened, the same week that I made these, I was also making "Square in a Square Stars" for  Long Time Gone.  The pattern looked like this:

So I started playing around with different fabric placements in Electric Quilt.  Here's one idea that  I came up with:

But of course, I like scrappy, and the more the better, so I also tried out this one:

It was then that I realized, that I already had nine scrappy little square-in-a-square blocks that just so happened to be the exact size I needed for this block!  In a flash, I added some Flying Geese units to the blocks I already had....

and I had my Square in a Square Stars:

It was also then that I realized that making two quilts at the same time from the same collection of fabrics was getting confusing.  I decided to back off from doing the mystery quilt and concentrate on Long Time Gone. The mystery quilt was free, after all,  so there is no $$$ loss

The beautiful House block that I spent so much time creating for the mystery quilt can easily be substituted for one of the blocks in Long Time Gone, so there will be nothing wasted there, either.

Oh, and those little 9-patches that I also  made for the mystery quilt?  They'll have a home in Long Time Gone, too.

Here's my tally so far:

Number of pieces for square-in-a-square: 85
Number of pieces in the House block:    56
Total number of pieces for Long Time Gone so far:  905