Wow.  To say that Modern Madness 2012 has been a roller coaster ride would be an understatement.

We began with 64 of the most fabulous modern fabric lines on the market and — round after round, week after week — you voted for your favorites.  Many (if not most) of the races were as tight as can be, decided by the slimmest of margins.  You’ve let us know that many of your front-runners were upset earlier than you had expected, and we never knew how the tournament would progress.

From 64, we got down to 32 … then our Sweet 16 … we determined the Elite Eight … and rooted for our favorites in the Final Four.  It all led to our epic final battle: the bold and graphic Echo, the debut line by first-time Modern Madness competitor Lotta Jansdotter versus the fresh and retro-sweet Ruby by the mother-daughter team of Bonnie & Camille.  1105 of you voted — the highest turn-out by far in this year’s tournament — and we’re excited to announce our winner.

By a margin of 57% (631 votes) to 43% (473), congratulations to our 2012 Modern Madness Champion …

RUBY
by Bonnie & Camille
for Moda Fabrics
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here’s Moda’s description of Ruby:

Ruby is a small town girl with big dreams, and even bigger style.  She works at the town ice cream parlor in her favorite red polka dot dress and can be found doing the jitterbug with her best girlfriends at the Country Diner on the weekends.  This cheery line is full of Ruby’s favorites, including a smattering of soin red and aqua, retro flowers, vintage prints and pretty little scallops.

Ruby now joins Habitat, our 2011 champion, in the Modern Madness Hall of Fame, and she is a very worthy champion indeed.  We’d love to hear your thoughts, both on Ruby’s ascent to the top of the heap as well as on Modern Madness overall.  We hope you had fun and learned about a lot of new fabrics and designers along the way.

We’d also like to build a readers’ gallery of Ruby projects to celebrate its win, so if you’ve worked with Ruby and have a quilt or other sewn project to share, please add your photos to our Fat Quarterly Flickr group.  We can’t wait to see them!

Scoring: for those of you keeping score, did anyone predict that Ruby was going to win?  If you did, give yourself 32 points!!  Add it to your previous total to get your final score.  Let us know your final score in the comments below — we’d love to hear how you all did!

And with that, we bring another year of Modern Madness to a close.  We truly hope you had as much of a blast as we did.  So who’s going to be back for Modern Madness 2013??