The Learning Process of a Challenge

Joining a challenge really stretches us outside of our comfort zone and is a great learning experience.  It can be frustrating at times when you run stuck and cannot think of something that will work, but by tossing wild ideas at it, it finally does come together (usually LOL!).

I wrote about our 2nd Elgin Piecemaker's Quilt Guild challenge in this blog post.  Here are some photos of the process I went through to get to the final quilt.

We started with the mini charm pack pictured above - the 2 1/2" squares are all white background with bright little motifs

I bought a charm pack of solids to give me a kick start and variety of colours which I didn't have to cut into 2 1/2" squares :-)

The new to me tool I used for this challenge was a Drunkard's Path 2" patchwork template set from Matilda's own which I purchased in a quilt shop in Holland two summers ago.  The units are cut from 2 1/2" squares and I used this mini Fiskars rotary cutter to get around those sharp curves easily.

My first idea was circles within circles, but that reminded me too much of pac man.

playing with some arrangements and colours but not enough of the same colour

I took apart some of the drunkard's path units and added other colours.  Part of the challenge was to try to use as many of the 84 charm squares as you could so I could not waste a single one!  Making some progress on the colours.....

Change to black and white to see the values; needs some work!  the lack of symmetry is bothering me...I like things square :-)

Had the idea to set it on point and square it up...trying different colours

How about coloured squares around it?  No, that overpowers it!

Maybe grey corners with a yellow square in it?  Hmm...no like :-(

In desperation I turned it around...hmmm...maybe this will work.

I liked the lighter grey triangles now with a small border around it.  The turqouise binding would set it off nicely

I quilted it with lines echoing the round shape

The quilting on the back looks kind of cool

It won viewer's choice in the challenge!  I really like how it turned out.