Somewhat Hidden Wells!

As I have mentioned, I have cutting fabric 1 yard and less into strips.  I only have true blues, purples, browns and black and whites to go but am getting bored and am surrounded by about 70 lbs of strips now!!  This will be good to make lots of charity quilts.  I am only cutting up what are called "solid substitutes" leaving the more pictoral or interesting fabric alone as it will work better as large squares or triangles.  

Hidden Wells is pattern created by Mary Lou Hopkins back in the 80s.  Her technique was a bit cumbersome.

I found several sources on the internet but none I had found gave me the results I wanted.  This semi finished top is the closest I have come.  I finally discovered a blog last night that answered my question.  It was what I had decided but was a little nervous about wasting more fabric trying it out.  This blog confirmed my suspicion as to why I got green and red mixed in the squares instead of a green square next to a red square.  This blog is Hidden Wells Tutorial.

This is the strip set that makes all of the above.  It is 8 1/2 inches wide and results in a 10 1/2 inch square.  

I thought I had it right until I took a picture!  I had done all but the equivalent of one block (see above) and finished the last block this morning and then sewed everything together.  Then I noticed that the four blocks in the lower right side were wrong.  I only had enough to use scraps to do the blocks over.

Here it is fixed but not before I actually did the blocks wrong yet again!!  I had to undo the blocks and then sew them replace the four smaller blocks on the quilt.  I now know how to get the blocks so that they alternate the green and red and hopefully by the next post will have an example of that.  Now to just add some borders onto this one as it is only 31 1/2 x 42 currently.  I think it will only grow to 36 x 48 eventually though.  I will also have a more detailed breakdown of the process if you don't want to go to the blog I have quoted above!

I also played a bit with taking a strip of 3 2 1/2 inch strips, sewing them together and then cutting 60 degree triangles.  I would chose more interesting fabrics.  You can twist these triangles around and make a variety of blocks.  I would sew that last seem if these were to be in a quilt unless I was going to insert triangles between them.  These were both cut from the same strip set.