Quality Sewing Time

I have been working away on a second iteration of the Stairway to Cat Heaven Quilt, and been having a lot of fun. I have never made the same project twice before and wasn't sure if I would like it, but I'm still enjoying the quilt just as much now as before.

The quilt consists of a bunch of nine patch squares. When I started on the first few, they were coming out wobbly, and not sewn perfectly.

1/8" off!

My solution was to spray starch the heck out of everything, and pin before I stitched so I wasn't wobbling around trying to line up the pieces while stitching. The spray starch made a huge difference! The fabric visibly stopped jumping and bunching as it went through the machine.  Very satisfying.

One reason I think I am enjoying this so much is that I LOVE color, and this quilt design is very heavily based around color. Lots of thought went into the color pairings for each nine patch square, and even more thought into the final layout, which is the stage I am at now.  Laying out the quilt is a puzzle: The pieces need to go from light to dark and no piece of fabric can touch another piece of the same color.

Below is a series of photos showing my thought progression through the layout process.  Apologies for the horrible lighting; there's only one spot in my apartment with enough floorspace to lay this out and I can't do much about the lighting there.

Here is iteration one. I noticed that even though I was using two different lavender fabrics, they look too similar when lined up adjacent to each other, so they needed to move so they weren't touching.

#2: lavender's still touching in one spot

#3: that block is far too dark for it's position

#4: I felt there were too many purples concentrated in this one area

#5: It feels like a dark horizontal strip; I wanted to break up that dark by moving some of those to the row below.

Current iteration. I am pretty happy about this.  There is a dark blue fabric touching the same fabric in the circled area, but I think it's so subtle that it's okay.

So what do you think? Any squares look out of place to you?  Looking at these miniaturized on the computer screen has really helped notice where the problem areas are.   I've really enjoyed working on these today and feel very productive :)