Colour My World Green

This is it! The last day of the Colour My World Challenge. I want to say a huge thank you to Ginette, MC and Janine for participating and inspiring me to keep going with this challenge. I had a great time learning and experimenting with a different colour each month, but the highlight for me was seeing what each of you did each month. I've also really appreciated all the words of encouragement and support that you awesome readers have given me and the participants throughout the year so thank you too!

For my green challenge, I decided to combine a couple of the techniques I learned from Heather Lair this summer for making a pine tree. Here is my green challenge.

I used the same torn-strip appliqué method as the wee landscape, but used it to make a fur fir tree. For the quilting, I did the 1/4" improv straightline quilting that I also learned from Heather and did with Heathia.

Detail of the quilting and the torn-strip appliqué

As with the other challenges, it is 14.5" square, with a zigzag finish. I'm not thrilled with how it turned out, but I learned a few more things about torn-strip appliqué:

• I forgot to put a piece of fabric under the torn-strips. It's fine if the strips are very tight together, like mine are, but if there's any space, the white Timtex shows through.
• If the fabric isn't hand dyed (ie. largely the same colour on both sides), then the lighter side colour becomes more dominant. I used scraps of commercial prints for a lot of the strips, which meant the unprinted back lightened up the colour significantly, making most of the tree much lighter than I had intended.
• The background star batik feels too busy for the tree. Something simpler would have been better, I think.

Live and learn, eh?

Here is a collage of all my Colour My World Challenges this year, in order of completion. It's very cool to see them all together. There's clearly an asymmetrical thing going, eh?

I'm still undecided about what to do with them. On the one hand, it would be fun to put them all together as a Colour My World Challenge quilt-as-you-go piece. But then again, I really love a few of the pieces and think that maybe I should just finish those separately. Thoughts?


Thank you again for joining me on this challenge, whether it was by participating or the encouragement and feedback all along the way. It's been a very fun journey!