Designing The Split Herringbone Quilt: Part 3 Placement

After drawing out my blocks onto paper I scanned them onto my computer so I would have a copy, then I had a brainwave about using Microsoft Word to arrange (and rearrange) my blocks so I could get it just right. Once again I am sure there is a better program out there that could do this, however Word is what I have so that's what I used.

The pencil marks didn't show up to well on screen so I used draw feature and coloured in some of the sections, gave them each a letter to identify them  and made them all roughly the same size -  this is what I ended up with 🠞🠞🠞🠞🠞

Next I made the page as large as I could, put the grid setting on and set about placing the blocks in a random (but eye pleasing) manner.

This would help me work out how many of each block I would need and hopefully a guess about the amount of fabric I would need

The rows with the triangles to the left I numbered 1 and the rows with the triangles to the right where 2 (eg the first row starts with Y1, the second A2). The idea being that when it came time to draw the blocks it would help me keep track of which direction the block should face

I made a list of how many blocks of each type there where that looked something like this...

It showed me if I had to many of one particular block and not enough of another - at one point I had 7 H2's and 0 K 1's

This is the final layout I came up with

When drawing out the blocks onto the greaseproof paper I was just very careful about which direction I drew it in. On paper blocks in the first row look like they belong in the second row and vice-versa - that took some getting use to (also lots of swearing)

Next comes Part 4 Fabric Math - working out how much fabric I needed....