Marsala, 2015 Pantone Quilt Challenge : Invasion.

It all started on Play Crafts' blog, a long time ago (okay, two months). A challenge. A REAL challenge. A color nobody likes. Some joke by Pantone (something along "let's see if people are sheeps and suddenly love a color because we said so"). A double challenge : make a quilt in a strange color nobody has in their stash and nobody's selling.

Believe it or not, I had some of it in my small stash. Some remnants from another life.
(as a side note, I would like to say that I just had to buy the zipper, everything else I already had in my stash !)

So, first, find the right color association. I hesitated between blue and green. Green was a bit "sad", so I choose blue.

(achtung ! overexposed photo and unrealistic colors)

Then the design. Having only scraps, I opted for a 40x40cm (15.74"x15.74") cushion cover.

(beautiful example of humanity 2.0 -I've heard that right now it is humanity 3.0-)

I think I spent two weeks drafting and re-drafting this one. (yes, I need a real size pattern, my brain can't manage small scale). I thought about paper piecing, improv, and everything in between. In the end, it's a bit of everything. I "improv'ed" the stripes, appliqued the hexies, and paper-pieced the complex ones. (note : I never ever paper pieced before)

On my drawing, the stripes and the hexies are aligned. In real life, I thought it was a bit flat and lacked depth, so I rotated a bit my stripes (I couldn't do it more than this, as my square of stripes was not very large).

And thus was born "Invasion" :

I quilted the stripes, first in the ditch, and then perpendicular, with "invisible" thread (what you see is actually the sun reflected in the plastic). I'd like to say I opted for geometrical quilting for general coherence, but the truth is that my sewing machine still refuses to make nice stitches in FMQ.

I then appliqued the hexies and quilted at 1mm of the edge. (sorry, RTW seamstress habit)

I apologize for the colors. The weather has been strange/aweful/too sunny alternatively for a month, and it has been hard to calibrate my camera with the difference between red and blue. (in reality the colors are much duller, and the "marsala" is almost perfect)