No Prints Allowed {sketch phase}

Over the weekend, I sketched out some ideas for the Robert Kaufman No Prints Allowed Challenge that the KC Modern Quilt Guild is participating in. I wanted to show you my process and ideas for the quilt.

I took a Brights charm pack to work with. I thought the colors would be pretty to work with, and I like the range of shades and tints in the pack. First I just laid them out and looked at them for awhile. I decided to focus on the color ranges for my project. Here are some sketches with my limited palette of colored pencils. Sketch 1 is what I saw most clearly in my mind, and really wanted to develop.

Sketch 1

 

Secondary sketches were just more ideas in case the first one didn’t pan out…

More sketches

Then, I cut all the squares into quarter squares, and set about playing with them on my design “wall” (yes, it’s the floor).

Here’s the first layout, based on sketch 1.

Design 1

I didn’t have as much color range as I originally thought, so this didn’t work for me. It ended up looked like a mash of color blocks, instead a nice gradation of color work. I still want to try this sometime (maybe for the monochromatic Project Modern challenge??) We’ll see. But for this quilt, I moved on.

Here are more layouts that I tried.

Design 2

Design 3

Design 4

Design 4 worked best for me, and I could just see it with the shades and tints included in the pack.

Here’s the final design progress.

Final design 1

Miss Alabama helped.

Final design 2

And finally, added the white for the background.

Final design 3

I still have some color blocks left over, so I may do a pieced border or back as well. Another post later this week will show the final pieced top. I’m excited! This was fun 😉