And we have our Link!

So far we have stuck to Linda's pattern pretty closely making only minor changes with colors. However, we knew we wanted to make Link a little different. We wanted his sword showing (because to a 7 year old boy, what's cooler than a sword being swung!), and my son also of course wanted a blue Link, which is totally legit and true to the game.

Changing up the pattern required some mental gymnastics for this tired mom brain, but ultimately we figured it out. With Linda's Link she made him double size, but with our sword swinging Link we weren't going to be able to make him double size. So I figured out that her pattern for Link had 4 blocks that were each 15x15 squares. So that's a total of a 30x30 block. Our sword Link was 27 blocks wide by about 12 or 13 tall. So he was too short. We didn't want to fill above him with empty space, so we created our own pattern for the hearts.
So, Link is 27 blocks himself and then 2 rows of black behind him and one row at the tip of his sword. Above him and below him I did a 2 1/2 inch strip of black (I was getting awfully tired of cutting out tiny squares!) and then on either side of the hearts there is about a 4 inch panel of black. I just need to add one more strip of black above the hearts and then i can finish sewing the blocks all together and my top will be complete (except for the border on the outside).
Whew! What a huge project this has been.
Hopefully you can expect a post pretty soon with a complete picture of the top along with my final thoughts and words of wisdom that I've learned from this project.