Marsala and An Uncertain Crossroad

My Marsala Challenge quilt top is finally sewn together! It's been such an interesting color to work with. When I first read about the color, I couldn't believe it had been chosen as the Pantone color of the year. Wowsers! Such a drab color. Now I can't believe how much fun I had working with it. Kinda funny to think there were actually fat eights and fat quarters of this stuff already squirreled away in my fabric totes!

A quick look at An Uncertain Crossroad on the floor...

And well..., yeah. Nobody had to twist my arm to buy it. If you really stop to think about it, this color is a foundation sort of color--an earth tone. Colors from nature are always among the first ones I'm drawn to even if some think they're on the shh... ugly side! Come to think of it, my favorite quilts have always seemed to incorporate a few questionable colors. Nature plays very well with colors like marsala, so why can't we?

Love the chunky circles!

For this challenge, I didn't want to run away from the color at all--or try and bury it in the details. I wanted to give it some respect! And although it was tempting to overwhelm the marsala with some of its prettier cousins, I decided to play with how the color might work as a base for making other colors shine or possibly intensify. All the very light strips of sashing in this quilt are what I consider to be the very lightest version of the color marsala. Some are more dreary looking than others, but used as an accompaniment for the unassuming marsala, they work very well. I really like how they provide a strong, vital foundation to help make the rest of the quilt sort of 'pop'.

An Uncertain Crossroad

As many of you know, I've also been playing with quarter circles for awhile. It was an easy jump to come up with the idea of blending the marsala challenge with yet another circle quilt. The older 'crossroads' block just seemed to perfectly bridge the gap between the antique look {where I get so much of my inspiration from} and the {slightly} more modern look I was hoping to achieve. It was a really great block for playing big slices of colors off of a receding background and I got to do my needleturn applique thing too. Win, win, all the way around.

And again....

Too, I love how my instincts steered me towards cutting the circle units in four different widths, making sure that the circles would come out less than perfect.  The crossroads in my life aren't usually what you'd call a smooth transition, so the somewhat jagged edges of these circles feel very right to me. For once I'm not adding a border onto my 61" x 72" quilt top as this one looks very happy as is! Time to link up with the Marsala Challenge over at On the Windy Side and play crafts. Thanks to the hosts for all their hard work and effort in getting this together!