Quilt 31: Civil War (Charm Squares) - "throw" (top assembled)

Oh, I'm such a sucker for charm squares.  I found the ones below at my favorite quilt shop and bought a boatload of them.

Oh... Moda.... you know how to design prints that just seduce me.

And they've been in my UFO closet for something like 18 months. I'd originally thought of a bedspread, but decided it would be too busy and so instead I'm going to make throws.

Some of the squares in the pack

Aren't the colours just glorious?

So here's the design I've come up with for these two throws: Simple. No lattice, just the squares.

My design for the charm squares

And now the hard part - figuring out how to arrange the squares. I really don't want two reds together or two blues together, etc. It took a bit of work to figure out an arrangement that kept all the prints and colours evenly distributed over the quilt.

And now... drumrull... it's BREAKTHROUGH TIME!!!!

One of the things that has driven me nuts on other quilts like this is how to keep all these squares in order as I'm sewing them, and EUREKA!  I've done it!

I pinned the squares in the rows together - and at the start of each row, put in pins to indicate the sequence of the row.  Row one has one pin in the leftmost square. Row two has two pins, and so on. 

The number of pins in the bottom squares record the sequence of the rows.

Oh my goodness... what a difference this pinning made. I was able to just FLY through sewign the pieces together and below is the result.

And now the borders:

Ready to quilt!