Muted Colors for Costume Mistress

From Sep 2014 - Apr 2015 I was blessed to be the assistant director of a musical production:
Savior of the World.

It was a huge 147 member cast with 10 dedicated committee chairmen, and thousands of hours.  And it was marvelous.

For each of the committee chairs, I am making a quilt reflective of their responsibility: Costumes, Sound, Lighting, Stage Build Out, Boat, Piano Accompaniment, etc.  So you will be seeing those works in progress.

This week is for our Costume Mistress who organized 10 volunteers to help create multiple costumes for the 147 cast members.  Designing, sewing, fitting, coordinating all the muted, greyed-down fabrics by scene was a ton of work and an utter exhilarating blast.  We did all the tunics, over robes, sashes, shawls, wraps, head wear, angels, lepers, & soldiers costumes in 10 days.  That's right: 10 days.  Jackie and I sat down with my sketches for various costume styles and figured out how many of each component for each character in each scene.  Then we calculated the yardage for each component and fabric types and weights.  Off to Hancock's and Joann's we went.  We bought and ordered hundreds of yards of Kona Solids in about 14 neutrals and had to dye much of the color fabrics to bring it down their hue.

So this is the Quilt of Many Muted Colors that I think I am giving to Jackie.  I may end up making her a classic Joseph's Coat of Many Colors pattern because this one is a bit too much color and the Joseph's Coat pattern just has wedges of color.  Note all the neutrals in the "stars." Of course, it still needs its borders...  And I need to remove and realign the blocks where the points are all in the wrong quadrant.  Ha! How did I not see that as I was sewing it together??

It was a mess organizing the colors and I did not do a terrific job at spreading them around but with all those neutrals and dusty, muted tones, it was fun to make.

I used the Wanta Fanta Block by The Bee Hive blog because of its kaleidoscope-esque look.  The designer used only one neutral for the centers which would make this a breeze to create, but my 14 neutrals was a challenge keeping their points in the right color block on its four sides... a bit mind numbing late at night!

Wanta Fanta is a paper pieced pattern.  For some reason (must be my printer setting) slightly reduced the corner blocks because they did not match up precisely.  Yet another reason to make another Jackie's Coat of Many Colors.

This was a crazy mess trying to keep the various neutral points lined up correctly in the blocks surrounding them.  Only 2 farkles to fix in the final top.