Round Robin: Organized Chaos

For this round of Once 'Round the Country, the round robin quilt bee in which I am participating, I worked on Adrienne's quilt. I actually went into this one with a "vision," thinking I knew exactly what I wanted to do. (I bet you know what's coming...) Unfortunately, the fabric allotment was not enough for me to confidently execute my idea and still leave enough for the next round. So, I sucked it up, took a picture, and started working on a new (improved!) plan:


The colors were really distracting to my eye and made it hard for me to focus on design, so I switched my photo to greyscale to "see" it better.

At the beginning, Adrienne told us that her vision for this quilt was "Organized Chaos"-- she really wanted to focus primarily on the prints, using the solids as just accents. The subsequent borders by Anne and Kris did a beautiful job doing just that, so I really wanted to follow their lead by keeping to straight piecing, using as many of the included prints as possible while still having a sense of some sort of organization. I got the idea for flying geese from the center block. It didn't use flying geese, but the outside edges of the block had that kind of flavor. I ran with it.


My border ended up being less "organized" than Kris's (the next one in-- if you look closely, you can see how wonderfully deliberate her use of color is), but maybe a slightly more organized than Anne's (the gorgeous fractured border surrounding the center block). Like Anne, I used every print available. Like Kris, I used very regular shapes throughout. I also tried to echo the center block (and Kris's border) by repeating the solid elements.

Overthink much, Robin? :P

I felt so out of my element with this one, wrapping my brain around it was a serious challenge. It was fabulous.