Fireworks: A New Project

Challenges

At this point in my quilting career, I feel like I have kept my projects pretty safe and straightforward, playing more with color than shape. The first real tricky project that I tackled was my Hopscotch quilt and we all know, that even though I won the round with the quilt top, I still have yet to do battle with the quilting :)

One project that I knew would be challenging, but caught my eye nonetheless, was another pattern by Camille Roskelley, Fireworks.

The only change I planned to make to the pattern was to make it smaller. Oddly, I have this thing against square quilts. To me, blankets should not be square, they should be rectangles. So there. I planned to make only 12 blocks so the quilt would be three blocks wide and four blocks tall.

My fabric choice also came to me right away. I wanted to use Denyse Schmidt's Chicopee collection. I had a full set of fat quarters stashed away for just the right project!

A Family Affair

I had the pleasure of traveling to Upstate New York for work. That just happens to be where my extended family is from, so I snuck in a little visit. My aunt Anna is an accomplished quilter and I knew she was just the person to help me tackle this challenge, so I made sure to pack my fat quarters and pattern in my suitcase.

My cousin and I headed over to my aunt's place and enjoyed a lovely afternoon of chit chat and sewing. At the end I had a completed quilt square! Not bad! These are by far the best flying geese I have put together and almost all the points look great. Color me pleased.

My first fireworks block.

Languish

As I shared in my Penny Patch post, I am not really a fan of the whole cutting part of quilting. At my aunt's, to keep things simple, I had only cut out what I needed to make the above block. On top of not wanting to tackle the amount of cutting involved in making 11 more quilt blocks containing 73 pieces each, I was struggling with my design choice. What were the best fabrics to put together in each block? Should I only use one of the color ways in the collection, or both as I had planned? Was the grey background going to make the quilt look dull? So I pondered and mulled and occasionally pulled the the fabrics out to see if I could come up with something that would make me happy.

At long last I decided that I wanted to continue to tackle this challenge. I thought the best way to get my mojo going was to make some progress. What feels like progress? More blocks! Here is my second block.

My second block.

Buoyed on, I finalized my fabric combinations and got all the patterned pieces cut out.

The rest of the color and pattern combinations

Now all I need to do is cut out all the background fabric. Not a small task. I don't want to let this one languish too much longer, but I do have a few other things on top of my list to finish before I continue this challenge. At least now I am excited to see it come together!