Alison Glass Challenge

Last fall I participated in the Alison Glass charm swap hosted by Quilting Jetgirl.  I ended up with a Charm Pack full of a rainbow of Alison Glass fabrics and no idea what to do with it! 

Around Christmas I got it in my head that I wanted to use equilateral triangles from the charm squares.  So, I ordered myself an equilateral triangle ruler from Amazon Prime so that it would be ready at home for me when I got back from my Christmas travel.

I started by cutting out equilateral triangles from the charm squares and arranging them on my design wall.  I originally wanted them in rainbow order but quickly changed my mind to put the colors randomly on the wall.

My first design failed because I didn't have enough triangles:

So I settled on this instead:

When I sewed it up, it got so much smaller! In the picture below, the top half is sewn up in rows:

I felt bad about all the scraps from cutting out the triangles, so I kind of turned this into a "no waste" challenge and I sewed the scraps into rectangles to use as a border:

It didn't feel right like that so I added corners and the triangles at the end of the rectangle rows (there weren't enough of the right size scraps to continue the rectangles all the way around the border).

I was ready to sew it up as a square quilt but then my quilt talked to me (weird, I know) and told me that it wanted to be rotated 90 degrees and turned into a rectangle quilt!  Who was I to argue with what the quilt wanted?

I decided on a navy blue backing:

But there wasn't quite enough of the navy, so I added the rest of the scraps from cutting the triangles and a piece of dark pink:

My first thought was just to quilt this quilt in a spiral so that I could be done with it, but the quilt spoke to me again and told me that it wanted all the triangles quilted in a special way.  I turned to my Angela Walters' books for "Shape by Shape" quilting for inspiration and this is what I came up with:

Looking at the back side:

Now for the white background... I was going to stipple it because I am super fast at doing that, but the quilt told me it wanted pebbles!  I have never quilted pebbles on a quilt before but I figured that I would just go for it! 

I love the look of the pebbles!

Here is the completed quilt: (the completed size is 36" x 41")

This ended up being such a fun challenge!  I love the end quilt and I had so much fun during the creative process.  This definitely stretched my quilting skills (which is one of my goals) and I love the way that the final quilting looks.

Thanks to Quilting Jetgirl for hosting the Alison Glass challenge and therefore encouraging me to find a way to use my charm squares!