Ugly Duckling No More

Remember these awful fabrics that I blogged about here...

Well, I turned them into this...

This was the result of the first challenge presented by my mean girlfriends art quilters' group. Click on the link at the beginning of my post to read about the challenge.

Earlier this week, the group got together to reveal our projects (I'll show a photo of all of them in another post next week). What you see today is my finished piece -- it's about 13" x 16".

The fabrics that I was given sat in my quilting studio for weeks before I figured out what to do with them. Everyone said they were Civil War-style fabrics, but they reminded me of colonial/revolutionary times more than Civil War. The fabric with the cherries made me think of George Washington (the fabled cherry-tree story), which then made me think of making a quilt with a tree or cherries or something, but nothing really thrilled me. Nothing was inspiring me.

That is, until a friend of mine gave me a quilt top to machine quilt for her. It hung on my design wall for a day or so while I figured out how to quilt it. It was a Gee's Bend-style quilt, with the usual improvisational piecing. As I was deciding on a quilting pattern for my friend's quilt, something hit me and told me to make my challenge quilt in a Gee's Bend style. So I quickly started cutting and sewing and before I knew it, I had a piece that I actually liked (even though I can't stand the fabrics by themselves).

I added the white fabric and the striped binding fabric. The cherry fabric is on the back. The piecing is all improvisational and the quilting was done to mimic hand quilting (my Bernina has a "hand-quilting" stitch). While I was researching Gee's Bend quilts, I read a description of the quilting that was something like this -- "Somewhat parallel lines, random distances apart". So that's what I did. And I love the result!

Unfortunately, my friend's quilt is still on my frame....