A Quilt Tale

Several months ago I came across I came across an unfinished project at my quilt group that needed a little help.  When I picked up the bag out of the UFO bin, one of my fellow quilters said, "Don't go there!  It is too ugly!"  Well, I couldn't resist a peek and had to concur that it wasn't very pretty, but I felt challenged to see if I could redeem it somehow.  I decided to name it The Ugly Duckling.


Here is the before picture:

Six blocks created an imbalance and there was way too much of that red fabric.  To tone it down, I removed the solo block at the top and added a couple of borders between blocks and the outer border.

Next came the quilting.  The pattern on the red fabric is leaves, so I echoed that motif in the three rectangles.  I outlined the pattern in the plaid block and did a sunflower in the light green square. For the red fabric I did fill quilting, roughly following the leaf pattern.  

While I wouldn't give this quilt the status of swan, it turned out to be a pretty decent little duckling.