Tropical Habitat

I love attending the East Bay Modern Quilt Guild meetings.  Everyone in our guild brings inspirational show-and-tell projects, and for a few days after our monthly get together, all I want to do is play with colored cotton.  For June, Freespirit sponsored a challenge for all the Modern Quilt Guilds.  We were each given some fat quarters of Jay McCarroll’s Habitat line and asked to create something with only his fabrics (plus some solids that we could add).  Here were the three fabrics in the original colorway that I received:

Fast forward a few weeks: Over the weekend, as has been the case a few times since I first witnessed what the great Tula Pink had achieved with a few scraps of fabric and some RIT color remover, I have been known to brew up a sulfurous batch of boiling color-stripping soup in a black trashcan in front of our apartment.  (The neighbors love this, I am sure.)  Once this brew is steaming and in action, the fabrics of my stash begin to shrink in fear, since often, I will strip the color from anything within reach for the pure curiosity of seeing what new creations will come if it.  Alas, this was the fate of my five fat quarters of Habitat.

From the original earth-tones colorway, you can see that the background of the scribbly birch bark pattern has gone from dark gray to avocado green, and the dots have all but disappeared.  The blue and orange botanical was spared the remover, but was not as lucky when, a few days later, I decided to dye everything red.  So there you go.  It is now a more tropical-looking Habitat than that with which we started, but I still think it will be fun to make something.  Now if only all of our socks weren’t pink…