One block wonder

In another effort to use up what I already have, I dug deep in my stash and pulled out lots and lots of this gorgeous fabric:

It's been waiting about eight years to become a stack and whack quilt, but I just haven't wanted to do another one. I made so many of them years ago when the books first came out, and loved everything about them, but I am stacked/whacked out.

I went online to my facebook quilting page, and posted that picture of the fabric. I asked for suggestions for an easy pattern idea that would showcase the beautiful colors. Overwhelmingly, the response was for stack and whack... sigh... But somebody also suggested "one block wonder". 

I had seen these before, and was intrigued, because surely they weren't simple?  I went on you tube and found a perfectly clear and understandable tutorial and made the decision. It was going to be a one block wonder. Let the cutting begin.

99 sets of 6 triangles, to be pieced together to form kaleidoscope hexagons, much like in the fashion of stack and whack (but this isn't stack and whack. It's one block wonder).

Then comes the fun part: trying to arrange them in a pleasing manner. "The blocks just speak to me" she says on the video when describing how easy it is to lay them out. I found this was not the case for me. I am a little bit artistically challenged, so I can maybe see that something somewhere isn't right, but I wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you why.

So, for my first attempt, I tried to blend the colors, or maybe it was transition them. Either way, I didn't like it. 

It looked too "heavy" or something where the red was, and it didn't seem to blend at all, once I backed up far enough to take the picture (it's not as light as it looks, but that's just my camera). 

I appealed to my facebook fellow quilters for help, and got plenty. There were a few that liked it how it was, but the most common opinion was to back up and judge each block by only one color... 

So I tried again, also attempting to more evenly distribute the reds.

 I like this layout much better, but have tweaked a few blocks since taking this picture. I think I'll let it hang for a day or two, and see what I think over time.