Meet the Challenge

Every year, our quilt guild issues a challenge to the members to make a quilt following certain guidelines.  This year's challenge was called a "Magazine Challenge", and the idea was to take a page from a magazine and use something on that page to inspire your quilt.  Inspiration could be a pattern, a color palette, a theme, a word, or anything the sparks your imagination. The page had to be submitted along with the quilt.  

Sounded like a fun idea, and so I checked out a few magazines until I came across this page:

I liked the color palette, which was actually somewhat outside my comfort zone, and I also liked the orderly arrangement of horizontal shelves with vertical items, so that was the page I decided to work from as my inspiration.

The first step, of course,  was to choose fabrics:

For a pattern, I immediately thought of Come What May by Julie Herman of Jaybird Quilts.

Here is my first arrangement of blocks on my design board:

The most difficult thing about  following the pattern  was to arrange the blocks so that the white strips would only fall along the horizontal direction, hoping they would mimic the white shelves in the magazine photo.  I liked it, but I wanted to make it bigger, so I added another row and sewed the blocks together:

I added a couple of borders, and quilted across the rows to make them like continuous units that wove in an out and over each other:

For the binding, I went with an orangey-rust batik.

Then I started wondering if I had done enough.  I thought about adding an applique of some kind to really hammer home the "pottery" inspiration.  I made a few sketches, based on the magazine page:

Eventually, I came up with a pitcher and bowl concept:

I chose what I thought were contrasting fabrics and ended up with this:

But, when I put the applique against the quilt, it just disappeared into it:

So I guess my challenge quilt was finished after all.  It would remain unadorned with additional pottery.  I submitted it to the quilt show as is, and no one was more surprised than I was when it ended up earning First Place in the Challenge category!

The finished quilt measures only 24 X 24" and was almost dwarfed by the ribbon.  Winning it was made all the more sweet by the fact that my mom, who had never been able to attend one of our previous quilt shows,  was there with me when my name was announced.  Turns out we never get too old to want to say "Hey Mom, look what I did!" 😀😀😀