8:56 (4 to 9, get it?)

It began with the red&white March 2011 Block Lotto block.  I am not what you would call a red fan; I was hard-pressed to find any red fabric at all for a much small challenge way-back-when but this time I decided to just bite the bullet & buy more fabric.  You know, to help the economy.

& since I was buying fabric, & I happened to have a 50% off any single purchase one-day only coupon in my purse & I was right there on that day...  I also bought a little (by my standards) cutting board with a lazy susan idea.  The short version is, if it were not for this purchase,many many 8:56 blocks would never have been cut; because of this board, I now have even more quilts in mind.

Almost everyone on the block lotto blog said how fast this block went.  That was not quite my experience, exactly.

I will say making the first step 4-patches was indeed a piece of cake.  Almost every selvage-to-selvage strip worked up into 8 pairs & then four 4-patches, so that pile did grow quickly, quantity-wise.

The next few steps really dragged though.  One at a time each 4-patch was cut one inch from that center seam four times.  Then the borders between the two were flipped, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  I like to do this kind of thing in bulk, but having one board from which to work & a desire to keep everything in order as best I could, it was one block at a time from here on out.

It probably did not help I was listening to the Fellowship of the Ring at the time.  All those elven legends, all that cut turn cut turn cut turn....stitch press stitch press...  Still so far I am happy with the results & I am 99.9% sure the worst is behind me (never say never).