An Orphan Finds New Life

Obviously thrown together without care.

 An orphan block that is...

Once upon a time I put this block together intending, I think, to continue adding blocks to it until I had a scrappy rail fence quilt.  The flaw in this plan being that I've never been known to handle scrappy well (although I am trying to expand out of my comfort zone - slowly).

After months of not finding anything in my stash or my scrap bin that I wanted to expand this block with, followed by months and months of leaving the poor block sitting in a dark corner of my UFO bag, I decided it was time to pull it out and do something with it!

Revitalized!

I thought it would probably make a decent pillow, but the block didn't really seem to stand on it's own.  I felt a rail fence pinwheel would probably be better as an independent block.

When I took the center seams apart, the rail blocks were about 6.5 inches wide by an assortment of sizes long.  I'm not sure why I thought that was a good idea, so I started by trimming the blocks down into squares.  (Much better!)  Then I rotated them around and tried again.

So here it is: one 12.5 inch block ready for some experimental machine quilting and life as a pillow!

Linking up with Design Wall Monday, Fabric Tuesday, and WiP Wednesday.