Stepping Back

I've been procrastinating.  Part of it is that I'm not in much a quilting mode lately.  But part of it is that I just wasn't sure that I liked where this quilt was headed.  When I planned it last year, the goal was to minimize the use of background fabric and focus on color.  There are three blocks though, that have a significant amount of background fabric, and they seem to all be clustered together.  I think that spreading them out by rearranging the rows might help things out.  I also think that the original block that I had planned needs to have more background pattern.

This was my original block plan.  I'm thinking now though, that it is too busy.  I'm working on a simpler version though, one that has some background fabric.  If I spread out the four rows with predominant background fabric, I think that will balance things better.  

Here's my fabric, and my original plan.

This is the new block I'm going to use instead.  It is a variation of a hopscotch block, or a variation of a shoofly.  I'm not sure if it has a name.  I'll work on the tutorial as soon as LAX is over (DH out of town again).  For now though, the corner units are 4 inch half square triangles, and the cross units are from  2.5 inch strips.  More to come.