Glorious Leaves of Autumn: a challenge quilt

"Glorious Leaves of Autumn", 20.5" x 26.5"

The theme for the Miami Valley Quilters Guild 2011 Challenge was “Glorious.” Each participant received a fat quarter of a yellow-gold cotton and a fat eighth of gold lamé. The rules were:

1. Must use at least half each of the fabrics given

2. Must be a wall-sized quilt, minimum 12” x 12”

3. Can add up to 10 additional fabrics

4. One quarter of the quilt must be pieced

5. Must include at least one 3-dimentional embellishment

Normally I like challenges. Sometimes when you are limited in what you can use or how you have to use it you might be prompted to think "outside of the box" more.

This one really 'challenged' me. I think it was the “one quarter of the quilt must be pieced” which is odd because most of my quilts are more than one quarter pieced. But almost every idea I came up with was mostly appliqué.

Of course I procrastinated on this project until a few days before it was due. Since the weather was changing and the temperatures were getting cooler, I was looking forward to changing colors of the leaves. I found a piece of fabric in my stash that had beautiful autumn leaves and even had some metallic gold printed on it that I thought would go well with the gold lamé fabric. 

I used this fabric with the yellow gold cotton to make some pieced blocks then used a dark brown as a border around the blocks.

I did see in a blog that another member mentioned that it’s easier to work with the lamé if you add stabilizer to it, so I did that and didn’t have any problems. The gold lamé was used as sashing between the blocks and as a thin inner border around the blocks. I couched some brown yarn on top of the lamé.

The yellow gold cotton was used as an additional inner border with corner blocks of dark brown. I used the autumn leaf fabric as the outer border. I added two beads on top of the yarn where the gold lame intersected itself.

There were 49 quilters who took the fabric intending to participate in the challenge but only 12 of us turned in our projects. I guess others found this challenge challenging. I didn’t get photos of all of the other quilts, but here are some of them.

---

 

---

 

The quilt on the left is by Maria Elkins and you can read about how she made it on her blog. (The posts start with the newest so scroll to the bottom and read the posts in reverse order.)