Habitat Challenge {revealed}

The Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild participated in the Habitat Challenge; we had our reveal last night. Some of these quilts were absolutely amazing!!

To recap the challenge: we each receive 8 fat eighths of Jay McCarroll’s Habitat fabric. We were allowed to add more Habitat fabric, or any solids, but no other prints.

To be completely honest, I was one of those people who wasn’t too crazy about this fabric when I first saw it. I almost didn’t do the challenge because of it. It’s just a bit… wild for my taste. A little much pink in there and a little too crazy. I like clean, modern simplicity, and this fabric definitely was not. Despite my reservations, I took on the challenge anyway.

I decide to use this opportunity to learn a new technique. I chose to do the Circle of Geese paper piecing that I’ve seen floating around the internet lately. I followed Chasing Cotton’s tutorial because it was chock full of great photos to keep me on track! I’ll admit, the first block went really really slowly. But once I got into a groove, they were pretty fast to put together.

Instead of doing my quarter blocks in the typical circle pattern, I flipped them out so it created a more graphic visual. I also used only one small triangle of Habitat fabric in each block. The rest of the block was solid colors that complemented the chosen Habitat fabric, and grays that let the colors pop.

When I look at my completed piece, I see an insect vertebrate, or perhaps a scarab beetle. It inspired me to quilt the piece in imitation of an insect. So I quilted circles where the “body” would go, and straight lines outlining wings.

Other people look at the same piece and see a kimono, puppy dog ears, or mountain peaks. You take a look and see what you see.

Almost half of the KCMQG participated in the Habitat Challenge. Here are four really crappy photos I took on my iPhone of all the quilts in groups. You can see each quilt individually (and photographed much better) on the KCMQG Flickr stream.