Something About Nothing

Recently Quilting Arts Magazine put out a reader challenge to make a 14" square art quilt to donate to The House Quilt Project.   The quilts are donated to Furnishing Hope , an organization that furnishes homes for previously homeless people. I have made a couple of quilts for them in the past and was happy to contribute another.

The challenge for my local quilt guild this year was to use a half yard of this ugly fabric in a traditional or art quilt.  The majority of the half yard had to be on the FRONT of the quilt. My first question was if I could over dye or paint the fabric and of course the answer was a big fat NO!   Marsha wasn't going to make it THAT easy! It took me a long time but I finally decided to dye some pink and brown fabrics and make a free form quilt out of it.  I am surprised with how happy I am with the results. I was going to call her "Straight up Ugly" in honor of the ugly fabric but decided that she has transformed the ugly fabric and so she is called "Straight up." She has inspired me to want to make more quilts like this with other  what-were-you-thinking-when-you-bought-that  kind of fabrics. Here are the quilts from the rest of the ladies. . . . . .The art quilts:  . . .the turtle on the right won the category. . . Congra...

I'm working on the Quilter's Holladay Challenge Quilt. Our challenge this year is circles and curves. Here is a small peek at one section of Little Blue.  No circles or curves in this piece! I am always the rebel in the group. I am planning on complying with the rules by quilting in some circles and curves - maybe even some hand quilted circles too. I was playing with the idea of adding some dangling circle beads from the bottom so I used some silky poly fabric I had and made some beads. But they just don't have the right feel or color so it's back to the drawing board. Any other brilliant ideas? Perhaps just the quilting will be enough. I'm linking this post up to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall party this week. Stop on over and have a look at what everyone else is creating!

26 Quilters participated in this Alphabet Soup Challenge Each participant made an 18"x 24" quilt about a letter of the alphabet.  The quilters were all so very creative with their letters.  My friend Kaye, took the letter K, for Kotex, a girl's rite of passage.  My friend Leigh's G stood for Gleevec, a drug that saved her life from cancer. I took on the difficult letter of "U" (bottom left) because my family loves The University of Utah.  Education is important to my husband and I.  My parents and grandparents never went to college.  My father never went past the 7th grade and my grandmother and her brother were the first to go to high school out of her siblings but she never graduated.  My husband's parents and grandparents never went to college either.  His mother only attended a few years of schooling because they couldn't afford to send her to school in China.  As a result we have felt the need to pursue our education and hopefully ...

Did you ever play the telephone game in grade school?  One person whispers a phrase into a second person's ear and that person whispers what they heard to a third person and so on and so forth.  Often what the last person hears is very different from what the first person said.  Our Telephone Quilt Challenge is much like this game.  My friend Sylvia started this challenge January, 2010, by recruiting 6 other quilt artists.  Sylvia took a photograph and shared it with Anne , who made a quilt inspired by the photo.  Anne then shared her quilt with Helen, who made a quilt inspired by Anne's quilt, and so on and so forth.  No one but Anne and Sylvia saw the original photo until yesterday.  Yesterday was the big reveal party where we enjoyed food, friendship and beautiful art quilt pieces. Sylvia's original photo is of some interesting sculpture in Chichester, England: Which inspired Anne's quilt: It's easy to see the cyclist in Anne's quilt when yo...

Here is my completed Quilter's Holladay Challenge Quilt. It all started with the fish. I read an article in Quilting Arts Magazine about how to make the fish. I loved him so much I built him a lake from hand dyed cotton and silk organza. I saw an image of an Owl on someone's blog and decided I needed an owl in a tree next to Mr. Fish's lake. The quilt was taking on many surreal qualities with the curly-q tree branches and stars in the sky and soon it all became "the one who got away" from Mr. Fisherman while he dreamed. There is a small dragonfly sparkly button above Mr. Fish but it's difficult to see this far away. This photo is a little blurry and out of color but I think it helps a little with the details. The only prize I won in this year's challenge was the opportunity to stretch my skills and build an art quilt that I love.  Not a bad prize at all.

I am thankful for the sewing and creative challenges I have received through work: Magazines: My Quilt Guild: And My 12x12 Group: Without these challenges I would not have tried, more or less created any of the above items that I love. Thank you challenges!

This years Quilt Challenger for Quilters Holladay was based upon this website.   We were to make a quilt that was 50 cm wide by 2 meters long using any fiber or technique we wished to use.  I decided to experiment with soywax to make a batik.  I painted some swirls with thickened  Procion Dye and then flicked spots of dye allover.  I then waxed the swirls and all the spots I wanted to keep.  I did this on my back patio in October.  I really liked how easy it was to melt the soywax in my make-shift double boiler but soon realized why it's really best to use wax in a warm enviroment - the wax was cooling too quicky on the fabric.  Luckily my friend Anne, the fabulous batiker , showed me a little trick in her class this summer that saved me.  Anne likes to keep a knife hot by sitting it under the coils of the hot plate.  This hot knife can then be used to remelt any wax that has refused to pentrate the fabric...