Challenge Yourself

 I like doing challenges.  You know when you are given a certain piece of fabric, a theme and maybe a technique or two that you are required to use and you have to come up with a wall-hanging or block. Our quilt guild does them ever year. 

One year our guild’s quilt show theme was ‘Home is where the Heart is’.  We were given a striped fabric with those words on it and we needed to make a house of some sort.  My house ended up on wheels and looked like an upside down heart.

                                                

Another theme dealt with stars. Well, I couldn’t use a plain 5-pointed star, I had to get crazy and used an stretched out 8-point star with a smaller star on top of it.  I did French knots around it in metallic thread to make it sparkle a little. 

Another theme honored out Guild’s ruby (40^th) anniversary so we were given one piece of red fabric.  I had just seen a movie that had a heart shaped ruby in it so that was on my mind.  So I took other red fabrics and created a crazy quilt type heart to hopefully resemble a ruby and I used metallic thread again to make it glimmer a little. 

Well recently I had the need to challenge myself and I had read an article of a quilt artist who had taken all kinds of suggestions of different quilting and embellishing techniques and design ideas like colors and when she got stuck would pick one of the ideas and use it.  So I decided to make my own list and start with 5 ideas and see what I could come up with from those ideas.  It has been so much fun to do that.

My first 5 picks was us to use a big shape, some ugly fabric, cut out an object, use squares, and add some fiber.  Well below is what I came up with.  I started small so this is only about 8 inches square. The big shape is the heart, the ugly fabric and the use of squares are the squares in the piece, The cut-out shape is the circle in the big square fabric and the added fiber is the small needle felted heart.

I like to challenge myself.  It gets my creative juices going and you are fairly sure your piece will be an original.   So if you want to give yourself a set of challenge ideas to work with, make a list.  Ask your friends for ideas, or thumb through quilt magazines and see what techniques or embellishment or color and fabric ideas other quilters might use and add it to your list.  Make sure you have items you are comfortable with and some that will take you out of your comfort zone.  After all it is not called a challenge for nothing.

 

©2023 Cheryl E Fillion