Warm/Cool Top Complete

266 half-square triangles. 219 different prints (114 cool prints, 105 warm prints). 6 full bobbins worth of thread. Two rotary cutter blades. One completed scrappy quilt top. : )

I love love LOVE this top! Thank you, Jeni, for your Warm/Cool Quilt-Along—I probably wouldn't have gotten around to making this without your QA. My girls love the top too. Miss E. is thrilled that we don't have to give it away. She's already had a good sit-down to check out all the colors and print motifs. Her favorite is the Sherbet Pips dog chasing his ball.

At the last minute I decided to take out most of the HSTs with purple. There were a couple of reasons for that decision—for one thing, I don't have very much purple in my stash, which meant that the colors weren't balanced. And for another thing, most of the purples I do have are fairly warm pinkish purples. So the purples just weren't working in the final layout, they diluted the warm/cool pattern, and out they went. (I did leave a few purples, like the Central Park print in the far right HST above.)

Working this many HSTs is not for the faint of heart, but here are my tips to make it a little easier:

1. Use a mechanical pencil to mark your diagonals. Somehow marking just seemed to go faster and was more accurate with a mechanical pencil versus a standard one.

2. Use a 4.5" quilt square for trimming your HSTs (or whatever size your finished HSTs require). Centering is vastly easier with a square. And if you don't have a 4.5" square, you could do what Elizabeth did and make one out of template plastic (just be sure to mark the diagonal for easier centering).

3. You don't have to stand up while you're trimming your gazillion HSTs! I'm embarrassed it took me so long to realize this, but just in case it hasn't occurred to you either, you can sit down while trimming—you just need a nice, low table. A coffee table might work, or I found that my daughters' little coloring table was the perfect height for trimming while sitting on the couch (I have a large ottoman in my family room instead of a coffee table, so I don't have that option). This discovery made trimming 266 HSTs much more tolerable.

I'm hoping to baste this one in the next couple of days and then try that FMQ again. Can't wait for this one to be complete!

I'm linking up to Sew Modern Monday.

P.S. Stay tuned - this afternoon I'll be posting the winners of my Boots fabric giveaway!