Making Monkey Business

Other than knowing I was going to name this quilt Monkey Business and that I would use some improvisational piecing techniques, I really didn't have any clear vision of how I wanted this quilt to turn out.  So I just started and pretty much designed it as I went along.

Challenge participants were required to purchase the ROYGBIV bundle  from Cherrywood Fabrics.   These are beautiful hand dyed fabrics with rich color and texture.  I have quite a bit of their fabrics already in my stash, but until now, they have been in that box of fabrics that are just too special to use.  Time to break out the box and cut into some of it.   We can choose any one of the colors each month as our focus color for the quilt, using all seven colors by the end of the 7 months. 

For no particular reason, I chose orange and found another orange in my Cherrywood stash.  

I started by making a few wonky monkey wrench blocks in various sizes.  I taped off a 20" square on my design board and played with block placement within the space until I came up with a layout I liked.  I realized I wasn't going to have enough of the light orange to complete the background area so I decided to add a "swish" of darker orange through the center. 

So now I had to figure out how to piece these blocks together while preserving the various angles I had placed them in.

I'm really not sure if I've seen this done before, or if I just figured it out on my own, but what I ended up doing was making a pattern by tracing the blocks onto a 20" x 20" piece of paper and then adding in seam lines where the various background pieces would need to be.

Then I traced each of those background pieces, adding a 1/4 inch seam allowance, onto freezer paper and cut them out.  I ironed the freezer paper templates onto the fabric and cut those out.  So now I had the pieces I needed to create the background.  

All that was left was to sew them all together.

Or so I thought.  Once I got this far, I liked it, but I just didn't think it seemed finished.  It needed......something.

My quilting mentor, Karen, always tells me to listen to my quilt and it will tell me what it needs. Well this one told me I needed to pick it apart and add more yellow and red to the monkey wrench blocks. 

I was not particularly happy about that idea.  Talk about a lot of work!  I am not at all fond of undoing the sewing I've already done.  I thought maybe I could find some other way to add in the additional color and I considered several options.. The quilt and I argued for about a week but in the end, the quilt finally won.

I spent a day picking out stitches and putting in new ones.   This is what I ultimately ended up with.

It is all quilted now and ready for binding.  As soon as it's done, I'll add more pictures.  Looks like I'll get this done just in time for the May 31st deadline and be ready for the new challenge starting June 1st.