Bursting With Charm

I call this quilt "Bursting with Charm".  It was one of those projects that started out quite small and then just kept growing.












It began when I purchased a rotary cutting mat and wanted to try it out.  I started with the nearest pile of scraps, and started cutting out 2 1/2" squares.

Because I enjoyed the process,  I dove into my non-scrap fabrics and starting cutting  2 1/2" squares from them.  Before you know it, I had this stack, which I sorted by color:

As my collection grew, I separated the one big stack  into piles by color.

I tried to roughly arrange the colors by their neighbors on the color wheel,

 and then I started sewing them together into 4 patches.

I laid out the 4 patches on a design wall, and just kept playing around with them until I had an arrangement I liked.  I tried to put the lighter colors toward the center and the darker colors toward the edges to give the overall quilt a sort of focal point.
I used my camera to take lots of pictures of the 4 patches so that I could remember where I had positioned them, and then started sewing them together. 

In the end, I had a quilt top with a total of about 400 squares.  I decided to quilt it with a large circular swirl to accentuate the "bursting" effect.

What had started out as just an experiement with a new toy, ended up being a fun excercise in color play, and an interesting quilt was the result.  I entered it into my guild's annual show and got a first place Viewer's Choice ribbon.