My Green Misadventure

I can't believe it's been two years!  The memory and the emotion is as clear as if it happened yesterday.  Our guild opted to hold a Past Presidents' Mystery Quilt Workshop.  We were given fabric requirements and instructions for cutting.  Once we arrived at the workshop site instructions were handed out.  I sewed and sewed and completed all my blocks and attempted to lay them out to create the quilt top.  It just wasn't coming together to my liking.  Several guild members tried to help and were very encouraging in their comments but I just wasn't happy.  When I got home I laid out the blocks on the design floor and tried to make them work.

 



But I just didn't like it.  It made me feel sad.  I asked my sister to take a look.  I trust her opinion and she very frankly told me it was an ugly quilt.  With that confirmation,  I determined to make it better.


I thought if I got rid of the pink half blocks at the top and bottom of every second column and substituted a medallion that co-ordinated with the "Heaven Can Wait" fabric line it would work.  It looked better but still wasn't right.

Then I thought that using the pink in the centres of some of the blocks might improve things.  And what if I cut some of the blocks in half and avoided the need for the accent colour at the bottom of every second row.  No that wasn't it either.

Then I tried a different green in some of the blocks.  Better but not yet.

What about using that green in the centres instead.  It's where I had originally wanted to use that green but I didn't have enough to cut the 60 rectangles required. That was looking better.

Can you see what I saw when I brought in the rest of the blocks?  I had two quilts.  One in the pink and blue-green colour way and the second in the creams and olive toned greens.

Doesn't that look better.  Now all I had to do was take the blocks apart,  replace the centres and forget about the beige and olive green toned blocks.

Add some borders and now that's  Heavenly Serenity.

Are you wondering what happened to the olive green and beige toned blocks?

I changed out those green centres for orange, made a few more blocks, added a border and had two quilts instead of one.

The greens looked good when I had all of the rectangles cut for the blocks.  They were actually from the same fabric line and the pink fabrics had both greens in them but when I tried to use them together in the same quilt top, I just didn't like it. 
The other problem was the green I selected for the centres when I found I didn't have enough of my original choice.  It had the two greens in it but the character of the fabric was all wrong to work with the other fabrics. 

This was a quilt nightmare but also a lesson well learned.  When Kathy asked for opinions about  fabrics she selected for a workshop my green nightmare came to mind.  I don't know what Kathy will decide to do but if you check her blog you'll see she had doubts about green.  Now some people could live with the original blocks I had made and I'm sure it would have been a quilt I used for picnics but I would never have been happy with it.