The Challenge

Our guild Challenge was last night so now I can show you my piece.  The theme was "A Road Less Traveled. It had a whole bunch of rules, size, there had to be a discernible "path", the path had to enter from the left and exit from the right, and the size was fairly small, 18" to 24" per side only.  You could interpret the theme in any way you chose.  Here is mine:

This is how it appeared on display.

This is what the base looks like:

Some of those fabrics are 30 years old starting on the left.  The path moves into more current fabrics, exiting on the right with fabrics I'm using in a current project today. If you've been quilting that long, take a close look, I know you used some of those fabrics too.  The quilt blocks represent some of my favorite patterns. The words tell  my quilting story, more or less. 

Here is the 9" feathered star I made from some of the fabrics used in my original Red and White--By the Numbers:

 My original plan had been to piece the feathered star into the quilt but when I got the star done I liked it enough to finish it separately and add it on top of the base quilt.  No one last night saw the base quilt as shown above.  

My next Challenge is preparing for a "Pretend I Am Moving" Sale--my closets are bursting at the seams and there is just too  much stuff everywhere.  The last four days in August I've invited my guild and all their crafty friends to come get great stuff at terrific prices.  So now I have to prepare.  So far, I've sorted out at least a hundred spools of thread and 30 books.  Then there are patterns, and notions, and lots and lots and lots of fabric.  My friend, Jenny K Lyon, recently remodeled her home and studio and wrote about moving into that studio here.  She is much more fastidious about order than I am, my space is much more chaotic, but she did make me think about the mess I have been surrounding myself with and the need I feel to pare things down a bit.    After the sale, if there is really great stuff, I'll post those items in my Etsy store.  I'll let you know when that happens.

I'm still working on The Splendid Sampler, keeping up though I occasionally change the block:

The bottom row are blocks 41-46.  Block 44 I colored with Crayola Crayons instead of more hand embroidery--so much faster!

And I got back to making more blocks for my Lifetime Quilt--joining four 10" blocks into a 20" unit--this will make it easier to take them off the wall when I need to:

Next week I'm going to start a series on Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Quiltmaking--so be watching for that.

Let's Quilt!

Barbara