Project Quilting Challenge 10.6

It's hard to believe that we are already at the end of the 2019 Project Quilting season, and this past week we had our final challenge. This time around it was a pretty sweet challenge :) the theme for the challenge was "Craving Chocolate".  I am pretty sure this household wasn't the only one who munched chocolates to get inspired this week! LOL

I knew right away what I wanted to create, but I really wasn't sure how I was going to do it. Years ago I saw an advertisement for chocolate diamonds & I WANTED one! My birthstone is the diamond & brown is one of my favorite colors, so what better than a brown diamond? Of course I always say there is a "want" and a "need" list, just because I want something doesn't mean I need it, fabric often falls into that and usually the NEED wins. But I really don't need a chocolate diamond, so I decided since I wasn't going to buy one & I am pretty sure no one else is going to buy one for me, I would make myself one.

After thinking about different fabrics I could use to pull this off, knowing I wanted sparkle, I knew there was no way I could come up with sparkly fabric in one week when the nearest fabric store is 150 miles away, and ordering fabric wasn't going to get it here on time.  I decided to try and make it out of chocolate wrappers, of course I didn't take into consideration that most of the chocolates in the stores right now are wrapped in pastel foils for Easter.

Now while I have to admit brown is a favorite color, chocolate really isn't my favorite candy, give me peppermint over chocolate any day. So in order to pull off this chocolate challenge I knew I needed to put Ron to work eating chocolates for me, I ate my fare share, but he took it for the team & consumed more chocolate than any human should in one week! LOL We won't be buying chocolates for awhile.

I found a picture of a chocolate diamond and printed it so I would have something to sort of follow, then I actually found printable coloring book sheets online of jewels & I was able to trace a diamond shape onto fabric so I would have a template.

I discovered that foil candy wrappers don't glue very well, and some of the more expensive candy didn't want to glue at all. After cutting all the little facets and sticking them down I knew I needed to do something to keep them down, I tried putting brown tulle over them, but didn't like the way it looked so I trimmed it around the diamond and decided to just use metallic gold thread and quilt the wrappers down. Then I quilted the outline of the facets, hoping that would give it a diamond look.

It really sparkled before I did the quilting, but I had to do the quilting to make it a quilt challenge & to hold down the wrappers. I found a fun little piece of fabric I used on the back that says I love you s'more, which made me long for summer campfires!  I thought of the song "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" while I was working & decided to name my quilt "Chocolates Are A Girl's Best Friend"
It was a fun little challenge to end the season. My quilt is 8 x 8 and fits nicely in my little quilted box with all the other quilts from this seasons challenges.