For the past few years, we've had a group here on the Quilt Board doing the mystery together, in the Quiltboard Challenges and Contests section. This year's 'On Ringo Lake' thread is still up, and I think last year's 'En Provence' thread might still be up. If you look through those, you will see some of the alternate color choices members here made.
I always intend to try alternate colors from my stash for the mystery, but so far I've been won over by the romance of Bonnie's theme descriptions and have ended up sticking to her colors. Do you have a link to the ORL quilt that caught your interest?