Elephant Parade...WIP Wednesday

So now that Circle Peeps is all wrapped up and being used for blanket forts by the girls, I can launch into something new and these elephants were calling to me from my list of potential projects.  (Warning:  badly lit photographs ahead - my sincere apologies! :))

My original idea was to make a simple and quick baby quilt with strips of marching elephants against the light grey background fabric with a few pops of color here and there.  The elephants all have tiny touches of color in their tusks and hooves - a bright orange, aqua, and purple palatte.  Fun!

I had seen a cute pattern on the current cover of Quilters World magazine - a 7-patch block that's rotated throughout the quilt so you get lots of negative space with strips of color and thought that I'd try something similar but slightly different. 

I picked 2 color sets of 3 - purple/aqua/orange and pink/aqua/purple.  The blocks that I created have tiny strips of grey between the colors so that they stand out like a film strip.

I was really liking the blocks - although I did the math a bit wrong so they turned out a bit smaller than I wanted.  And then I went and held them up to my elephant strips. 

Not bad, but definitely not the effect that I wanted.  Even when I was rotating the blocks to alternate between horizontal and vertical strips of color, it was WAY too busy.  I had wanted sparse pops of color and this was not working.  Back to the drawing board!

I left it alone for a couple days and then decided to go back and keep only one 2" square of color per block.  A couple of "demo" blocks later and I'm liking it MUCH better.

Now that I know what I'm doing (and more importantly liking it) I think it will come together pretty quickly!  I doubt that I'll be quick enough for it to count as a finish for 2012, but it does give me a pretty good jump on a finish for 2013.

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