KISSing

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm fortunate to belong to an art quilt challenge group with a few of my local quilting friends. For more than a year now, we have been challenging each other with a new project every three months or so. What you see in the above photo is my finished project for the latest challenge -- we were to use a letter or letters of the alphabet in our quilt. No other restrictions.

For the first several challenges, I stressed and worried about what I was going to do, but while working on the one from last time, I decided to just KISS it (Keep It Simple, Stupid). This whole experience is supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not something that keeps me up at night. So I continued with the KISS approach with this one as well.

I started with this....

....lots of scraps...

...even scraps that were already sewn together...

I then randomly placed about 5-7 layers of scraps on half of the wrong side of a piece of black fabric, about 12 x 25 inches...

I folded the other half over the scraps and sewed through all the layers in a pattern resembling the letter "V". Some of you may realize that this is basically the technique for making chenille...

I then started to cut through the top layer of black fabric using sharp scissors...

But I decided that I needed to cut through more layers of fabric in order to get more of an interesting design in the end...so I remembered that I had a chenille cutter somewhere in my sewing box....

That made things a lot easier and gave me the results that I wanted... 

But it needed one more step in order to get to what it looks like in the very first photo. I had to put in the washing machine and dryer..

And it came out just fine...and surprisingly, there were very few threads on my husband's underwear when I finished the load!

I call this piece "V Is For Victory", because I was victorious in completing this project without any complaining, whining, or stressing!

To see my previous challenge pieces, click here.