Fluttering & Voluptuous Vortex

4 identical blocks rotated to create 4 different configurations

Back in October, I trekked up to Thimblecreek Quilt Shop for Cara Gulati's Voluptuous Appliqued Curves workshop.  I admired Cara's bright cheery fabric selections and packed up equally bright tone on tone fabrics inspired by this butterfly fabric.  I loved the process of free form drawing your own curves onto paper and then recreating them through applique.  And while the original quilt involved 16 identical blocks that are rotated to create 4 different designs---I opted to stop after making 4 blocks.  But I was then left with deciding which corner to pivot my design:

Once I narrowed down my selection to the bottom left design, I then needed to decide on background fabrics, with the hope of using the butterfly fabric in the outer border.  I spent an entire morning auditioning a variety of background fabrics:

Auditioning Background Fabrics

Left with too many background fabric choices, I asked Doug to weigh in...and thrilled when he choice my secret favorite--the black and white swirls which seemed to echo the colorful center swirls.  As crazy as the fabric is, it actually manages to tone down the bright center swirls!

Once the difficult decisions were behind me, the actual quilt construction and finishing steps went surprisingly fast, including the quilting!  Armed with my handy dandy painters tape, contact paper and trusty walking foot, I drew inspiration from Angela Walter's Free Motion books.  I marked out the center circle and 1" increments around the border to guide my radiating wavy lines using variegated orange/gold thread with only one start and stop!  Once I removed the contact paper circle, I did a circular spiral design.

Here are some pictures of the finished piece, which I absolutely love!

And my obligatory dog modelling quilt pic featuring Panda!