Starting a New Challenge!!

Yesterday was snowy so the nothing much was stirring in this house.

Most inhabitants were more concerned with keeping warm rather than being active.

Even the DH decided to postpone a Walmart run until today. 

I declared it a quilt design day! It's time to start working on a new challenge.

A LQS - Pieceful Gathering Quilt Shop - has started their third annual challenge quilt.  The Challenge is The Daring Downton Debacle (DDD) using the fabric group, The Downton Abbey collection from Andover.  

Collection of Downton Abbey fat quarters

We are making a row quilt this year and the first month of instructions have been released.  I needed to find a royalty named block.  I finally got a chance to dive into this book.

I looked for king or queen name blocks - nothing I liked.  So I hunted royal and found...

This is 'The Royal' (Ladies' Art Company, 1898) or 'Royal Cross'.

Okay - I like it and think I can work with this - it needs to be either a 6" or 9" block. Time to break out the graph paper and get busy.  Starting by just drawing the basic block in rows, then drawing the row again with variations.  I got a little carried away and drew some variations that had 25 pieces in each block, with some really sharp acute pointy curves - in a 6 inch block! I don't think so. In order to see how it will look with color, I need to make a swatch card and assign a pencil color to each fabric.  I shopped the stash to add to the Downton Abbey fat quarters and have a total of 21 fabrics so far.

Making it one row at a time means some decisions regarding color placement won't be able to be changed so I have to just go with my gut.  That kind of approach can war with my control freak gene, so it's a matter of pushing ahead, releasing control, and going with the flow. 

The block variation I like has 29 pieces. Really??!!! Okay - Deep Breath! I think these are going to be 9 inch blocks.  And I may have to rethink that block design.

I don't (yet) watch the Downton Abbey series but I may have to start - for mandatory quilt design educational purposes. Yeah, that's what I'll tell the DH in order to wrestle control of the remote!