Hot or Cold Mini Quilt

Hot or Cold is a few things. It’s a scrap quilt, a stripe quilt and a quilt that plays with the traditional HST block.

Back in 2016, I made a bee quilt called Sunset Dreamin’. It’s one of my favorite quilts that I have designed. This quilt was one of my first quilts to hang at Quiltcon at Quiltcon 2017 and was also featured as a tutorial in Curated Quilts.

For this quilt, I asked my bee mates to make long striped blocks. The striped blocks were cut at 45 degree angles to piece them all together. This left a bunch of different sized striped triangles scrap pieces. Scraps too good to toss.

Originally, I had planned to make these scraps into a pillow to go with the quilt. But then in 2021, a group of Finnish quilters (@nordiccrafter, @organisaattori, @tilkkunen and @tilkunviilaaja) hosted a quilting challenge, “Connected Stripes 2021” on Instagram. When I saw the challenge, I knew I had some striped blocks! So 5 years after making the original quilt, the inspiration came to leave them just as they were and turn them into a modern take on the traditional HST block, infilling as needed to make all the different sizes fit together. 

I looked at mixing up the warm and cool blocks, but in the end I liked it best as having the cool and warm blocks grouped together.

The back! Back in the day of doing the bee quilts, I found that for each set of blocks I requested there was usually one that wasn’t just quite right. Usually, they fit in despite being slightly off. I needed the striped pieces on the front of the main quilt to be very straight. I had one block that was curved. It was curved too much to use in the original quilt. But for this one, it worked perfectly for the back of this one! I love the swoosh on the back!!

The label really matched this back of this one!

It took me a little while to get this on the blog, but in the meantime, it’s been being enjoyed on the dining room wall!