Paint Chip Challenge

I am a member of the Prickly Piecers quilt guild, a chapter of the Arizona Quilters Guild (AQG). Our program chair issued a paint chip challenge to the members of the Prickly Piecers. We were to find paint chips that started with our initials. For example, if your initials are ABC - then you needed to find paint colors that started with the letter A, the letter B, and the letter C (i.e. Asparagus, Blue, and Cream).  You could only use one color for each initial and add one other color, so four colors total for your quilt.

My initials are LKK. I found many colors for L. But K!!  I could only find 5 paint chips from all the brands of paint in 3 different stores that started with the letter K!! I have 2 K's!! What a dilemma! I finally settled on a sage (Khaki Sage), a purple (Kalamata Olive), and an pinkish shade (Lovelace).  I found a mottled sage fabric, a dark purple floral fabric, and a polka-dotted batik pinkish fabric that matched the colors of my paint chips well.  The polka-dotted batik was the only fabric that matched my "Lovelace" paint chip - after searching about half a dozen local quilt stores for something a "Lovelace" shade!! For my one other fabric that we could add, I found a beautiful stripe that included all three of these shades.

I found a portrait image from a copyright-free Art Nouveau book from Dover Publishers. I love Art Nouveau designs and I enjoy drawing and painting portraits, so I thought this image would make a beautiful quilt. Also, it was a circular design, which I thought would be unique. The sage color would work for the background pieces, the edges of the hair clips, and the whites of the eyes. The dark purple shade would make great tresses of the hair, the eye brows, and the pupils of the eyes. That left the polka-dotted pinkish shade for the flesh of the neck and face. Did she have measles or chickenpox? How was I going to make this fabric work. I ended up cutting around the polka-dots (to avoid measles or chickenpox) and created a mod-podge of the "Lovelace" fabric to create the face and neck.
The striped fabric with all the colors was used to delineate the hair tresses, and for the binding. The quilt is raw-edge appliqued and I free-motion quilted it. I embellished the hair clips with beads, spangles, and feathers from my pet chicken.

I won first place for our guild's paint chip challenge! I entered this quilt "Mystic Woman" in the Annual AQG Spring Quilt Show of 2012, where I won first place in the Small Quilt, Applique Category. I was delighted when I found out.