the next quilt

This quilt was inspired by a book mentioned in this post of Deb's over at Works in Progress. To begin, I went through my stash and picked out a bunch of fabrics that were bright and saturated, and mostly monochromatic, with not too much white. I spent WAY too much time narrowing down the prints, with helpful input from Robin, Quynh, Chara and Ahava. After much back and forth, I ended up with 18 prints, and a medium gray background.

The design was inspired by the Random Reflections quilt, though I did things a little different (trying to be more efficient, as always!). I already want to make another one, and Chara has asked for a writeup, so I'll try to do that next month.

But for now, I need to settle on the layout, and get this puppy done. I've got all the strips sewn into groups of 6, and here's the most basic layout - all the rainbows going in the same direction (let's call that A).

And here's B - pretty much the same thing, but with the middle column reversed in direction.

And here's C, with the rainbows in the same direction, but each column is staggered by one group.

Those layouts are all a little large - 66" x 95". I could change up the layout by removing one rainbow (and make myself a mini quilt with it!). This would give me 4 horizontal stripes instead of 3 vertical ones, with overall dimensions of 63" x 88". Here's D, where two rainbows go to the right, and two go to the left.

Or layout E, where they go the same direction, but each row is staggered by one group.

Any votes? Or any other layout ideas? I did consider chipping each block in half (through the "center" of the colored portions), and randomly recombining them so that the colored bits are all varied widths. But I'm afraid that might not look great, and I don't want to risk it - I'll try it on the next version instead. So, I think I'm leaning towards the last layout... It's a little smaller, but still a decent size. And I really like the idea of having a small version to keep for myself!

I asked Trudy, but she didn't have an opinion. But at least she stayed off the "design floor" while I was working on the layouts! :-)