It seems I’ve spent an obscene amount of time thinking about the Habitat challenge.  The EBMQG meeting in June provided me with fat quarters of most of Jay McCarroll’s Habitat fabric line.  The link has lots of background about him and the MQG challenge.  Yesterday, I went to my favorite LQS and added some solids (mostly solid) as prescribed by the “rules” of the challenge – which was to only add solids in order to highlight the fabric line.  I also added one of the prints that I didn’t get from the meeting to round out my selection of the habitat line.  Plus, I really wanted to be able to bind it with one of the prints too and would never have enough from the fat quarters.

My stack of goodness. I bought the top three to add to the Habitat line: Kona Olive and Coral(?) and an unknown mottled aqua.

I flirted with pinwheels, and improv stripes but decided to give it some order with a well-known patchwork pattern and to make it simple.  I was worried the pinwheels would be to busy, and would take me much longer to cut (anyone have a good shortcut for cutting the triangles?).  In the end, I decided to make a snowball quilt.  You can find an example of a snowball quilt here.  I added contrasting strips of solids to the fat quarters – partly to add interest and partly to extend the size of the fat qarters so I could cut more 8″ squares from them.  You can see the coral strips going through the birch FQ there, and then a finished 8″ square from the dot fabric.  After the squares are all done I’ll add the triangles to the corners probably mostly in olive – but I’m doing this by feel so we’ll see!  And, a little sashing, perhaps?  Thanks to Westminster and the Modern Quilt Guild for a fun challenge!  Come and join us at our next meeting to see what everyone else has come up with – we don’t bite and we have alot of fun.

Cutting the 8" blocks for the snowball quilt.