finished quilt top: it's a hoot

(Disclaimer: Due to inclement weather you will just have to deal with indoor photos of this quilt top... also I had folded the quilt top to take to my LQS and I was too lazy to press it again, so please ignore the giant wrinkle in the middle....)

I finished the 'It's A Hoot' quilt top.  I am horrible at naming quilts.  I marvel at the names people come up with for their quilts.  I am completely unoriginal and just name the quilt after the fabric line, which in this case was It's A Hoot (by MoMo for Moda).  More about the fabrics used in this post.  

I had originally planned on using the fabric to make a chevron pattern like this one I saw on Pinterest.  However, after I pieced the HSTs and had them laid out on my bed, I just wasn't happy with it.  I had wanted to do some kind of a rainbow effect, but that just didn't work with the number of yellow prints that I had.  Then I tried a completely random layout in regards to color and that looked like a hot mess to me.  (It just now occurred to me that I could have copied the exact layout of the Pinterest quilt.  Wow.  Master of the obvious over here.)  Anyway, as I was mulling over my options, I decided to flip the HSTs so that all of the colored triangles were in the bottom right hand corner.  From there, I laid them out in a sort of rainbow effect, with the darkest colors at the top left and fading to the lighter colors to the bottom and right.  I liked the way that looked and so that is what I went with.  I'm pretty happy with it.  Not completely in love, but I like it well enough.

Also, in my original plan I had a border around the chevron pattern - using the small, green polka dot fabric that I used as my background fabric for the HSTs.  Basically just like the Pinterest quilt.  However, in this new layout, border fabric looks out of place against the HSTs (at least to me - I don't have a picture of this so you will just have to take my word for it).  It was too much of a visual break between the diagonal "lines" of the quilt and the horizontal / vertical lines of the border.  Which really is no big deal to me to not use borders - except that now this quilt top measures 48" x 56", which is a really random size.  Just barely large enough to be used as a lap quilt, but on the bigger side for a baby / toddler quilt.  I did not pre-wash the fabrics because they were charm squares, so there will be some shrinkage after washing.  Plus, the quilting usually shrinks the quilt up some.  So it will be interesting to see what the final measurements are after quilting and washing...

Which leads me to quilting it.  I think I know what I am going to do, but then again, this entire quilt has changed from the original plan I had, so who knows....  But that's just one thing I like about quilting - there is no right or wrong!  I think I know what fabric I want to use for the backing, but it hasn't come into my LQS yet.  So getting this quilted is on hold until that fabric comes into the shop and I make up my mind!  In the meantime, it is on to the next project!

I'm sorry this post got so long-winded.  Thanks for reading!

-V