I must admit to being a bit nervous about the whole thing. Working on a quilt that was ultimately going to belong to someone else is a bit daunting. What if my addition stuck out like a sore thumb? What if I didn't love what others did on my quilt? What if working on a short deadline made me crazy? (Or perhaps that should be crazier.)
So with pizza boxes, some basic rules and fabric in hand we jumped into the deep end. Five of us started the round robin and it turned out GREAT! Every one wound up working out of her comfort zone, stepping up her game and thinking about pleasing the woman whose quilt she was currently working on . Every two months we shared what we'd added with everyone except the woman who started and would own the quilt. The last meeting was the "big reveal." They were wonderful. I'm missing a picture and want to show them all at once, so I'm going to start with year two.
Four of us participated in year two and we decided to try a technique we'd seen in a magazine. The project was called slice of life. Two of us started with photographs and two with patterns. What we ended up with was amazing. We sped up the process at the halfway point so they'd be done in time to hang at our guild quilt show in May.
Each design was cut into four slices. The slices were fused and at the end the owners quilted and finished them as they desired.
The first quilt is Jan's.
Jan started with a pattern, sliced it horizontally into four pieces and traced each piece onto muslin. She fused one section and passed it on, not seeing it again until the reveal. Jan chose to put narrow sashing between the slices and border it like a window. Even though everyone used different fabrics, the result is smashing. Now I want to plant more poppies outside my window.
Jean used a pattern of a giant poppy and asked us to stay in the color groups of the original design.
She cut the pattern horizontally and sewed the slices together without sashing. The differences in the slices are subtle and the bright colors give it big impact.
Judy took a photo of a zebra taken by a photographer friend, traced it, enlarged it and asked us to make the zebra different colors in each horizontal slice.
What she got was realistic features on a horse of many different colors. Her accurate drawing and the careful piecing of each of the ladies allowed her to sew the slices together to get a unified image of a very funky zebra.
I used my own photo of peppers and asparagus, traced, enlarged, and sliced vertically.
The ladies stayed within the basic colors of the original photo.
I loved the result and thought it would be interesting to see if I could bind them separately, hang them together and have it look like one quilt. Everybody did such a great job and I love it.
The most interesting part of the whole exercise to me is that what started out as a push toward trying new things produced such wonderful results and also acted like a trust exercise. I can hardly wait to start year three.
Thank you to quilterblogs.com for including our blog. Check them out to see what other quilters are up to.
QB1
Quilter Blogs & Store Search COMING SOON: PICTURES OF YEAR ONE
No comments:
Post a Comment