Baby Panel Progress

I've been having fun slowly working with my rainbow scraps.  All of the colorful scrap fabrics are now cut down to size for making triangles.

I cut my fabric for making half square triangles with a one inch allowance.  The standard 7/8ths allowance for HSTs always has me running up against the edge of too small, and that is no fun.

One yellow scrap got removed from the running because it was too narrow, but I have more than enough yellows.  And having one less fabric helped make my layout work more smoothly; now I will have four triangles of each color.

Seams Easy "ruler" for marking HSTs

The other side of these colorful HST blocks will be black to match the inner and outer border, so I also cut 42 black squares.  That went much faster!

Instead of using chalk for marking this time, which leaves thick lines and extends my seam allowance, I went to Joann's and got a new tool.  It's a mechanical pencil by Fons & Porter.  I thought the marking medium was a very thin chalk, but it's not.  It's similar to pencil lead.

So far I'm quite happy with it.  It leaves thin, clean lines; and the eraser works well for removing the lines both immediately and after several days of sitting.

I also attached the first round of borders to the panel.

There was some math involved in making the inner borders.  First the panel didn't come out to be a nice even size, I believe the finished size was 22.25 x 27.25.  That seemed odd to me, why an extra 1/4 inch?  Then the borders also had to be coordinated with the size of the triangles in the middle border so that the corner triangles would line up correctly.

Panel built up to 27x33

Don't forget that voting is open for the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  I hope you'll consider voting for my little duckies.  Please and thank you!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social and W.i.P Wednesday.