Modern Quilt Guild Madrona Road Challenge and more

Marny here...with a deadline looming, I am going to use a recent trip to California, a sudden snow event and a great line of fabric to meet a Modern Quilt Guild design challenge.  

Carmel Beach looking across to the 18th Fairway at Pebble Beach.  Note the green, gray blue water and the blue sky and the charcoals and browns of the rocks.

A small sample of all the flowers blooming-daffodils, iris, daisies, etc, along with these primroses.  Note how the lights and the brights explode off the dull gray cement backgrounds.

Point Lobos, see the "sunbathers"?  The white froth of the ocean next to the dark and dull rocks or on the deep blue water itself really pops!

Within two hours of my return home we had a sudden and substantial snowfall.  Too much white, but the geometry of the dark lines is easily seen.  High contrast between the light and the dark is very useful.

Our Des Moines Modern Quilt Guild is doing the Madrona Road by Violet Craft challenge sponsored by Michael Miller fabrics and The Modern Quilt Guild.  Our deadline is still ahead, while the judged competition has been completed.

(See more about that here.)

What with Quiltcon and one thing and another I am still at the "Oh no, when will I get started on something stage?"  It seems this panicky concern with a looming deadline is often the starting point of the design process for me.  How about you all?  I will keep these lessons from nature of dull/bright and dark/light in my mind while I work on the challenge.

Madrona Road from Michael Miller Fabrics is a well designed collection of fabric.  It includes a variety of scales, geometric and organic shapes, and an interesting color palette.  

These are the fabrics we were given to work with seen together.

Here are the fabrics set apart from one another.  I enjoy them more touching one another than spread apart. This might be why I like cutting up fabrics and putting them back together with other fabrics.  Quilting that is.

First step, add more fabrics.  Solids were allowed in our challenge.  I have seven fat eighths of challenge fabrics, so why not purchase six one half yard pieces of solids???  Who knows how we choose what to buy in preparation when we do not know what we are about to make.

A dark charcoal gray looks good with these two.  (And everything else for that matter.)

Various solids that pull out elements within the prints.

Here is an unusual greenish gray that goes with the green cast of some of the grays in the collection.  It is not a gray I am attracted to normally but it has become very apparent through the years that the least liked fabrics sometimes are the best additions to a quilt.  Time will tell in this instance.

See you next Tuesday, hopefully with some progress to show for the challenge project.