Woo Hoo!

At the Flying Geese Quilters Guild I have a bit of a reputation for my jubilance upon winning anything, even the smallest door prize. So you can imagine the racket when I learned that I had won third place in Generation Q Magazine's Quilts Made Modern Block Challenge.

Mind you, I had a 3 in 10 chance of placing. But I had a better chance winning a drawing at my guild last night and didn't win that, so hey. Probability aside, those other seven blocks are AWESOME, so my competition was steep. And the first and second place blocks are SUPER AWESOME, so I'm totally grateful the judges (including Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr of Fun Quilts!) thought my block was worthy of third place.

I came across this challenge by following the blog tour for the Weeks and Bill's newest book Quilts Made Modern: 10 Projects, Keys for Success with Color & Design, From the FunQuilts Studio. I learned about the book and the blog tour because I follow Weeks's fantastic blog Craft Nectar.

A few thoughts on my design process here. I printed out the start of a block, cut it out, and then started folding it along the lines to choose what kind of symmetry I would follow. I settled on making the design symmetrical around the line that divides the circle in my final drawing. Then I doodled with my ruler and compass (clearly modern quilters dig curves as the top three blocks all included circles or parts thereof). Once I got the line drawing I liked, I scanned it into a JPEG and used Paint to fill in the colors. I thought about Weeks and Bill's approach to color in The Modern Quilt Workshop: Patterns, Techniques, and Designs from the FunQuilts Studio. I picked an analogous color scheme centering on a peachy orange and two hues on either side of it, then a light and medium value of each. It's reminiscent of the color scheme in the XOXO quilt in The Modern Quilt Workshop.

Placing in this challenge is awesome, but I think I'm almost more excited about discovering this new quilting resource: Generation Q Magazine. If you're into quilting in general or modern quilting in specific, you will love it.

Thank you Generation Q Magazine!

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