The Great HST Caper

Twelve hundred (give or take a handful) 2.5" half-square triangles trimmed.  I'm finally done.  DONE.  DONE.  Can anyone say jubilant?  I started trimming on Aug.28/11 after blogging about them in this post.  My daily minimum trimming quota was 30, although I frequently did twice that number.  And, in anticipation of my trip out of town tomorrow, I put the last of them through in a final spurt of determined desperation today.  I took a pic of the last two to commemorate the end of that monumental task.  Maybe I should frame them...

And here's the pic of the box full.

I still haven't quite decided on what to do with them all.  I know that sounds kind of silly.  Some quilters pick a pattern and start cutting and sewing components for it.  Generally, this also gives a person an idea when to stop cutting or sewing same said components.  I always seem to do these things the long way around.  Here I am with a box of 1200 HSTs and no specific pattern in mind.  These are really scrappy, maybe a little heavy on the green, containing a couple hundred different fabrics.  These were made the longest most tedious way possible.... pairing up 3" scrappy blocks, and drawing lines on the back of one of the pair.  (Never again!)  My mother always accused me of doing things the longest and most complicated way possible when I was a kid.  Guess I haven't changed.

I've been keeping an eye out for patterns I like that use a lot of scrappy HSTs.  There are some real beauties out there, but most of the ones I liked required cutting more fabrics and using my HSTs as a frame or border around the block.  Always a possibility, but that would have used barely a third of what's in my box.  I've narrowed my selection down to three block patterns.

Option 1 - Depression Block (free pattern here at Quilt Blocks Galore).  Using 2.5" HSTs, my blocks will be 8.5" unfinished.

Option 2 - Don't know if this one has a name of it's own (it must).  I added in a few extra HSTs to my Depression Block to make it 12.5" unfinished.

Option 3 - a Scrappy Sawtooth Star.  I do love stars.  This pattern will make 8.5" unfinished blocks.

I did consider this star pattern, which I have been making with bonus 1.5" HSTs.  (originally blogged about in this post)  It could be done, there are many duplicates of the fabrics in the 1200 HSTs.  But I have to admit, the thought of sitting down and digging through the box to match up fabrics in a stack of 1200 is making me nervous.  Did I say nervous?  I meant nauseous.

So I'm leaning heavily towards option # 2, with the sawtooth star (option #3) making it hard to finalize my decision.

But there's no real hurry to decide.  I'm headed out of town tomorrow.  And when I get back, I still have ten current projects to work on.  The final choice can wait a while.  Maybe I'll see something else that uses up masses of half-square triangles that I can't resist.