"Eyes of the Sun 2" Is Finished!

I'm finally ready to post quilt pics. Yay! Here's the story. Those of you who are on the Quilt Art email list may remember the bag of scraps exchange/challenge that was organized a while back. Well, I didn't participate in that one, but a smaller group I belong to liked the idea and sto....er...borrowed it. We called our version the Bag O' sCraps challenge. Or just the Baggo for short. The idea was that you fill a largish ziploc bag with Stuff from your studio and send it to the coordinator, who then swaps them around and sends them back out. You get a bag of stuff in the mail and you make a quilt primarily out of whatever you find in the bag. You're allowed to add stuff from your own stash if you like, but are to keep the additions to a minimum and work from the bag as much as possible. The idea, of course, is to work outside your comfort zone, with fabrics, colors, and embellishments that you might never choose for yourself. And as a bonus, it works as an art swap, because the quilt you make goes back to the person whose stuff you made it from and you get back a quilt made from the stuff you sent. Fun! When we did the challenge last year, I ended up making a quilt for Julie Zaccone Stiller, while Laume Zekas made one for me. The anonymity thing didn't work so well, though, because I guessed right away that I had Julie's bag and I found out later that Laume guessed she had mine too. But we're still trying for anonymity this year. So far, I don't know who got my Stuff, because we're still well ahead of the deadline, but the bag I got was put together by the superfantastic Tristan Robin Blakeman. I guessed who it was from as soon as I saw the contents and after I finished the quilt, the coordinator confirmed that I was right. Take a look at what I had to work with: Honestly, I have to say it was more of a fun interlude than a challenge this year because the stuff Tristan sent was really rather fabulous and was a color range I LOVE. As soon as I saw all those orange fabrics and that so many of them had spots and swirls, an idea for another sun quilt popped into my head. I did a few sketches and this one is the one that worked for me: (posted just for Deborah, because I know she loves to see design sketches!) After that, it went together rather quickly. Nearly everything I used came from Tristan's bag. The only exceptions were that I added small amounts of four black prints from my stash to add some variety to the background. And I used some pale yellow tulle from my stash to make a translucent "window" in one area. Here's a close-up of the peek-a-boo circle, where I captured some of the fibers Tristan sent between the layers of tulle: (clickable if you want to see it even more close-up) I don't know if you can tell it from the photo (since it's photographed against my design wall) but batting and backing fabric are cut away from that circle and it's totally see-through except for the fibers trapped inside. And here, finally, is a photo of the finished quilt: "Eyes Of The Sun 2: Solar Flares" 18" x 24" soon to be in the collection of Tristan Robin Blakeman