Colorful Quilt Patches

I had planned to be blogging about the armature for my large doll today, but my week went awry.  The most that I was able to accomplish on that project was to determine the length I needed to cut the pieces of PVC pipe.  I hurt my shoulder and had to go to the doctor.  The doctor sent me to physical therapy.  The physical therapist has set appointments twice a week and also given me exercises to do twice a day at home.  All told, this will be taking a nine and a half hour bite out of my week for the next several weeks.  If I am lucky, they won't have to do surgery on my arm.  That will be determined in about six weeks.

In the mean time, I had a few minutes here and there I would run into the studio and cut a few blocks for my quilting guild's new challenge quilt.  I wasn't planning to do challenge quilt right now, however I decided to be a good sport and join in the challenge at the last moment.  I enjoy the educational aspects of the guild, and I want to participate as much as I can, but sometimes the guild has more activities than I can handle.  It takes me a long time to make a quilt.

The challenge was interesting.  Each group had six people.  Each of us started with yard of fabric, roughly 42 inches wide by 36 inches long.  (1.06 m. x 0.91 m)  We each made a small cut at the half-way point of the width of the fabric and tore the fabric in half.  We kept half of our original fabric and passed the other half of the fabric over a couple of people.  Each person tore half of that piece of fabric in half, kept half of the fabric and passed the rest over to the next person.  We kept tearing the fabric and passing fabric to different people.  I can't remember the rest of the pattern, but the bottom line is that everyone ended up with a piece of each fabric.  The pieces ranged from our original half yard (0.56 m x 0.91 m.) to a piece about four by six inches  (10.16 cm. x 15.24 cm.)   From there, we have to add fabric from our own fabric stashes to make a quilt that has to be a minimum of 36 inches by 42 inches. (0.91 x 1.07 meters).

The process is further complicated by the fabrics don't exactly match.  Each person brought in a fabric without regard to what anyone else might be bringing.  We had to mingle around until we were able to find fabrics that worked fairly well.   I think that was a good idea.  It gets us working with people with whom we might not ordinarily work with on a project.  So all of the fabrics will have to be somehow finessed into a quilt pattern.  Each person in a group will have the same challenge colors, but what colors they add to it and how each one of us will interpret the quilt is going to create many quilt patterns with the same material.

My original fabric was the bright red.  The first picture shows the colors that will be in my quilt.  The first two rows are the challenge colors.  Everything else was added from my stash of fabrics.  This is going to be a very colorful quilt.  I'll blog more about the quilt as things progress.  I am debating whether or not to change out the bottom fabric.  The color is right, but the pattern is geometrical while the other patterns are more abstract.  I guess I will make a block and see how it looks with the other blocks.

We plan to have a showing of our quilts in our August meeting.  I am always amazed at how many different ways you can make a quilt using the same colors.  Perhaps everyone has the same feeling.  We are all proud of the quilts we make, but we also worry that our quilts will not measure up against the others.  However, we persist.  We learn something with every quilt we make.

The second photo is for a completely different project.  Perhaps you read or saw in the news about the terrible fires that raged in California this year.  Thousands of homes burned to the ground.  People lost everything.  A quilt guild in another part of the country decided that they wanted to send people that were affected by the fire a quilt.  The guild put out a call for a specific size and type of quilt block.  They asked that each person that wished to participate to send two blocks. They said if other quilting guilds would send them quilt blocks that they would put the  blocks together and make the quilts.  I expect that they will get more than they bargained for with this project.  The word is spreading from guild to guild and state to state.  I expect that quilt blocks will be pouring in from everywhere.  Anyway, the second photo shows the fabrics I will be using to make my blocks. 

I hope that things will be better next week and I will be able to blog about the armature for the doll.  Check back next Sunday afternoon for the new blog post.