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.

Finally!

After several weeks of waking up at 4AM and stressing about what I'm going to make, and after hours and hours spent thinking and looking through books and magazines and the Internet for inspiration, I believe I may have finally settled on an idea for the current "mission" of my challenge art quilting group.

When we last met, we were given the theme of  "spring" and told to go through each other's scraps looking for pieces to use in our assignment. We are free to interpret "spring" any way we want. One additional rule is that we are to also use "a recognizable piece" of a solid fabric in the final project. I'm still deciding between two solids, but that will be a much easier task than coming up with the design.

I'm glad this headache is over....now to actually get working on my piece (due in just over a month)! Wish me luck!

Mean Girls

A few of my quilting friends and I recently decided to form an art quilt group that would allow us to stretch our quilting ideas a bit.  I am not an artist by the common definition of the word, but I do love to work with fabric and color. Some of the members of the group are more "artsy" than others, but we all want to try new things, which is very exciting. No quilt police will be allowed anywhere near our group get-togethers.

We plan to take turns planning "missions" -- things that will allow us to try new techniques, new colors, new patterns, whatever. As our first "mission", together we decided that we would each draw another member's name out of a hat and then provide that quilter with 4 or 5 fabrics to use in her first piece. These fabrics were to be out of that quilter's normal comfort zone.

The quilter who chose my name gave me the fabrics you see in the photo. Those who know me know why I've titled this blog post the way I did.

I think I may have to quit the group...