One-Block Wonder - Getting started

I'm using this book as a guideline to making my own one-block wonder quilt. The book has pretty clear instructions, and the photo illustrations are really good. The technique isn't new by any means (anybody remember Stack and Whack by Bethany Reynolds?!) and it uses a ton of fabric, but at least it's just ONE fabric. And there's the beauty of it - one fabric that produces a hundred different blocks. You'll see. Follow along with me.....

The fabric I'm using isn't what I would have picked out for myself since I'm not much of a fan of black backgrounds. But I chose this particular fabric with an eye toward my parents' new condo - I think the black with touches of reds, yellows, greens and a hint of blue will go in their new great room really well. I can almost ALWAYS count on finding what I'm looking for at my local quilt shop (Kindred Quilts). Take a good look at the fabric - when it's all said and done, you'll never know that was the base of it all.

The following is going to be really abbreviated, for the whole, entire, complete she-bang, you really will have to get the book! The first step is to find the repeats in the pattern of the fabric and, to make hexagons, you'll need to cut 6 (some icky math : hexagon = 6 sides) sections of the fabric. This is why you need some major yardage - I used a little over 4 yards. Carefully stack the 6 sections on top of each other. Use pins to line up the edges by pinning through the exact same place in all six sections. This is the real pain in the butt part - time-consuming, and nitpicky. Haste makes waste. 

Now that the sections are pinned on all four sides, I carefully lay this out on the cutting board and make the first cut to trim up one edge. I only cut about 1/2". Then I make the first, gulp, real cut. It's a 3 and 3/4" strip from selvage edge to selvage edge. Put a couple pins in the large section and cut another strip.

Laying one strip out on the cutting board, I used my equilateral triangle (icky math alert: all 3 sides are equal) ruler and cut the triangle sections out. I have to take the time to pin each section together - after all, I'll have... hmm, I didn't count, but surely more than 70 of these sections, and I sure would hate to drop them and they get all mixed up!

I felt like peeking at a couple of the sections. I fanned four of them out to see what the final image will look like.

Now that's inspirational!! I can hardly wait - each one of the triangle sections cut from 6 strips will be a slightly different version.