Layer Cake Quilt Along nearing Completion (or not)

I got my last two blocks made!

As I was laying out the blocks and starting to sew some of them together, I thought....

Considering my goal is to make quilts for all of my family and several of them want purple quilts.....

Instead of sewing 20 together, I could sew 12 together and make 4 more blocks, and then I could have two lap quilts!

Four blocks doesn't sound like much, right?  Well there are 16 half square triangles (HSTs) in each block and so I have 64 HSTs ready to press open and trim!!

A tip from Wendy over at Ivory Spring is that she doesn't press all the components of her blocks open before assembling, but finger presses them... so I rifled through my sewing drawer and found a finger presser....

Not sure what the R and L mean (right or left handed?)  Anyway, I tried that method out for the last two blocks and found it to be pretty good and time saving!

I may group the 12 blocks into warmer and cooler purple groups that could possibly look similar to these layouts...

  I decided against sashing, as nothing was looking good in the audition-- maybe because I have too many different gray backgrounds.

I'm linking photos up in the Material Girl Layer Cake Quilt Along Flickr group.  There are some breath taking quilts in all sorts of colors and patterns to see!