President's Challenge at the LFQG

The London Friendship Quilt Guild had a President's Challenge due for the month of May to celebrate 30 years as a guild. The rules were simple. We received two Fat Quarters in the guild colours; one gold with little stripes and one solid blue which had to be visible on the front of the quilt. One of the dimensions had to be 30". The focus fabric is shown in the photo below and was used in the top and right side of the cubes.



I had a Japanese fabric that I picked up at The Marsh Store in the sale bin and thought it would be great for a Spinning Four Patch. I bought 4 repeats and added half a yard or so to possibly use as borders. I happened to throw the two FQ's for the challenge on my sewing table and it landed on that Japanese fabric and the colours blended beautifully! I've been having so much fun with the One Block Wonder quilts and then the light bulb went on! Could I do a One Block Wonder with this Japanese Fabric? But, I only bought four repeats and needed six. I remembered buying extra and wondered if possibly there was a sixth repeat. I managed to squeeze one 2" strip for a sixth repeat and I figured it would be fun to see how small you could go on these hexagons. Here is the original fabric:

I sewed the hexagons together and began experimenting with them. My first idea was to use 30 hexagons. Here are a few layouts and ideas that I tossed around:


Using 30 hexagons would be difficult, so I decided to make one dimension 30" instead and added some cubes in the focus fabrics:

I found some wonderful navy blue that matched beautifully and added that for borders:

I used the rest of the yellow focus FQ to add a small 'lippy' between the quilt and the binding.

If you click on the photo above of the focus fabrics, you can see the quilting in the blocks and the photo below shows the feather quilting in the borders.

At the guild meeting last week, each entry was assigned a number and we all voted for our favourite. I was very excited that my little quilt won 1st prize!! Here is our President, Rose B. holding up the quilt while I had to tell everyone why I chose this design and where the 30" dimension was. I'm saving my prize money to spend at the big quilt shows in our area next week :-).