QuiltCon Charity Challenge 2017, part 2

As outlined in our first Charity 2017 blog post, Michèle and I are trying to motivate as many of you as possible to participate in whichever way you choose in this project. Together, we will create a memorable quilting experience together.

You can see in this year’s challenge rules that the color palette is predominantly blue, ranging from teal to indigo, with its complementary colours in yellow and shades of golden yellow, possibly accented with pink. The only neutrals permitted are snow white and silver gray.

The design challenge is to play with scale. A few examples of directions to explore on design include going very big to very small, or mixing several scales of a chosen design motif, as well as going for pixelation.

I suggested to Michèle to look at Ruth McDowell’s book ‘Pattern on Pattern’ as an interesting way of manipulating scale. Michèle will be bringing her copy of the book to the May meeting. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend, but my sketches and suggestions for an approach will be present. So bring your ideas and help map out our basic choice for motif. Each person can then develop her block or section individually into contributing components for our quilt top.

Then, in order to keep the creative juice for the project simmering over the summer, we are proposing two follow-up challenges to you:

Challenge 1  Color Play: Go through your stash and pull out prints that coordinate with the colours in this year’s palette in preparation for our first sew-in this fall. The posting QuiltConCharity Challenge: COLOR! for last year's challenge gives a very good tutorial on how to go about doing this.

Challenge 2  Design Exercise: Based on the scale and shapes decisions reached at the May 10th meeting, try your hand at sketching some possible overall quilt designs that could highlight the notion of scale by combining the different blocks or sections: try interlocking large and small scales of the selected motif and placing them using Alternative Gridwork. Get inspiration from the McDowell book, and take another look at this posting QuiltCon Charity Quilt: Alternative Gridwork for a refresher on gridwork.

May to August will be our Brainstorming phase:

• Tell us what inspires you and what you have discovered. (All members) 
• Tell us what expertise you like to contribute or new skill you like to learn by doing it for this project. (All members) 
• Solicit vendors for material donation. (Anyone with good connection) 
• Pick out prints from your stash that might work well with the palette of this year. (All members) 

Let’s have fun together!

- Lily