Two for the HGTV Crayola Challenge

I knew I was doing Bonnie's HGTV Challenge quilt back in December, but I found out a couple weeks ago that a woman local to me was also making one and wanted me to do the quilting. It's pretty bright. OK, it's blindingly fluorescent! But I do just love these colors together. Here's how it works. HGTV sends each participant a crayon of random color. You get to select one other fabric color to add to it, and it must match to a Crayola color. She was given the aqua, and chose to add the grass green to it. She initially wanted just an overall stipple since it is a donation quilt. But thankfully I talked her into something more creative. This is the continuous pattern I devised for her. The fabrics hace swirls and leaves, so I copied these motifs to the quilting.
My CC got better with practice. It was a little harder since the strips and the sashings were slightly different sizes. Overall, though, I think it worked ok. I love the two borders; kind of simple, but nice. And who doesn't like leaves and tendril swirls??

The owner was very pleased with it, and agreed it was SO much better than stippling. She even showed it to people at 3 different quilt shops that she visited that afternoon after picking it up. I always appreciate the free advertising. Can't beat that. Plus, she left me another quilt to do for her.

Here is Bonnie's quilt. She was given the sea foam green crayon, and chose to pair it with chocolate brown. My photo definitely washes out the green a bit, but it's a nice pairing. The pattern is simple and leaves plenty of room for quilting...a pleasant and a daunting thing. Her quilt is considerably larger than I was expecting. It only needed to be 54"x70", which is what I thought I'd be quilting - a very manageable task for a couple of days. Afterall, these must be delivered by Feb 1. Yes, 10 days from now. The quilt arrived 4 days ago and is 68"x86"! Yikes-

As many of you know, I am furociously trying to practice feathers everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. I chose to do much of the quilting monochromatically, brown on brown and green on green. But I wanted a little bit of crossover to give the quilt a softer look. The whoppingly wide outer border is definitely done in green, to help hide my oopses with the feathers. In hindsight, they are pretty good. I love the look of the twirly-whirly feathering. It's the darn corner tear drops that are the hard part. Message to self...get some teardrop templates!!!

The color crossover is shown below. As I CC'd the diagonally running squares, I also did pairs of swirls in the green on the brown. Similarly, as I feathered the 24 8" brown squares, I did a pair of leaves in the brown thread on the green fabric. There's also a row of vining leaves for the brown inner border.

Though I may have done a fair bit of cursing about various issues with this quilt, I am happy with how it turned out and hope that the recipient is too.

Be sure to look up the HGTV Crayola Challenge online and see how you can buy a raffle ticket too. You might win one of these quilts, and your proceeds will go to support the Ronald MacDonald House.