Back in February 2014, I saw a scrappy quilt in American Patchwork & Quilting that caught my eye.  I pulled out the pages with the tutorial on how to make that quilt, and saved it - for 5.5 years to be exact! I loved the traditional feel of the blocks, but wasn't sure exactly what colors or fabrics I wanted to use. After a few wrong turns, I found this quilt, and knew I wanted to make mine Christmas colored (green circles and red lines).

This pattern is an adaptation on the Burgoyne Surrounded block, and I love how changing the sashing simplified it so much. One change and such a large impact! 
I started cutting pieces for this quilt in the second half of 2019 and finished piecing it in March of 2020 (nothing like a pandemic to provide you with enough time to finish a quilt with one million pieces).

The "Tone it Down" block contains 97 pieces (oh mama!). The original pattern calls for 20 blocks and finishes at roughly 75" x 93".  I edited mine to only be 16 squares so it finishes at 75" square.
When you count the sashing in my version,  that makes for 1,817 pieces in total in this quilt. This quilt has the most pieces of any quilt that I've every made.

 This was another quilt that required a ton of low-volume fabrics for the background. I pulled not only black-on-white fabrics, but also a few green-on-white and red-on-white cuts to round everything out.
I backed the quilt in my favorite pistachio extra-wide minky and had it quilted by my local long-arm quilter with this snowflake pattern called "White Out" from Urban Elementz.

I  bound the quilt with this fun red, white and green diagonal stripe from Connecting Threads (but I can't find it on their website currently). Striped binding are fun, and Christmas stripes are the best!

I had this quilt quilted back in July, and saved it to share here with you during the holiday season.  I absolutely love holiday quilts - especially new ones. Last year I gifted my two scrappy holiday quilts (see them here and here). This one, however, I am keeping for mysel! This quilt feels somehow monumental and I look forward to years of enjoyment.

The good news is that the pattern is still available on the All People Quilt website. Click to purchase it: Tone it Down.  You can see more of my  in-progress pictures at #myrthstoneitdownquilt. You should also check out the #toneitdownquilt hashtag for lots of eye candy.

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If you've made (or are making) my Blue Goose quilt, then you definitely need to make something with all those corner trimmed off half-square-triangles. Those 4" x 8" flying geese trimmings make fantastic 3.5" unfinished half-square triangles: 324 of them to be exact.

When I realized that I would have a lot of HST squares, I started looking for a block that wouldn't result in bulky seams (most of the seams nested in some way).  The Annie's Choice block (above left) caught my eye, but the math didn't work quite right. (I had 324 blocks...that makes for a quilt 18 blocks x 18 blocks, but a 4x4 block doesn't go in to 18 evenly.) So I started doodling, added another row to the block, and came up with a block that was made up of 6 squares x 6 squares (the math worked beautifully)!  I named it my "Shattered HST" block because when you put a few of them together in a quilt they start to look like shattered glass.  Now I'm sure that I'm not the first person in all of quilting history to come up with that block design - but for now that is what I will call it.

When I had all my squares laid out on my design wall, I realized that I wanted the quilt to be a little bigger. So I added an outer border of HST squares to get the quilt to finish at 60" square. That makes 400 HST squares for this quilt. My final layout is shown above.

I backed this quilt in my favorite silver minky and had it quilted with the "River Run" pattern again. As I said in my Instagram post, this quilt is so busy that the quilting would never show up on the front of the quilt, but I like the way it looks on the back.

As you may have read in my Blue Goose post, these quilts were made from the majority of my dark blue, light blue, and darker gray stash.  I was happy that I found one last stashed gray piece that was long enough to make the binding for this quilt.

This quilt is crazy scrappy - and busy! But I love how it sparkles and has so many internal secondary patterns within the Shattered HST blocks. Can you see the radiating diamonds? Pinwheels in the corners where the blocks come together?

You can see more pictures of this quilt using the #shatteredhstquilt on Instagram.
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