be worried, hell may have frozen over...

See that there quilt above? I did it. Yup, me. Its pink, its a flower, and its (dare I say?) cute. (And no, I didn't forget to sew it together. Read on...)

Tomme Fent issued a challenge on the Quilt Art list called the Fractured Quilt Challenge. There are 40 of us participating. We all worked from the same photograph, made four blocks from it, send them back to Tomme, and get four back from different artists.

I was very intrigued by this idea so I signed up and then when I saw the photo I thought..."uh-oh, I'm in trouble." For those of you who know me, you understand the title of this post. I don't do pink (I think I'm actually allergic to it), I've never made a flower quilt (ever), and my work tends to lean toward the darker side of life (remember that black is a color too). Still, I liked the idea and thought to myself "Time to try something different."

So I did it. And you know what? The sky didn't fall and I didn't break out in a rash (so I guess I'm not allergic to pink after all). I can kind of appreciate the color now. I don't think I'll use it in a lot of my work but I might be willing to give it a go once in a while.

The shadow was annoying, couldn't figure out what to do for it. Actually ruined one block trying to add it on and had to make a second one. There was much mumbling about that - and not all nice words. I ended up using a dryer sheet. Those things have some awesome transparency to it and the unscented ones are pretty fragrance free. My iron complained about it but hey, it'll live. I think I might use some more of them, I've been wanting to experiment with translucency. These didn't go through the dryer though because I wanted the stiffness.

Since I'm a junky for 3-D stuff on my quilts and the blocks are supposed to reflect our personal style, I did some dimensional work. The center of the flower was fun, its basically purple strips of fabric that have tied and knotted to each other. And I like the row of beads on each petal.

I would have liked to have added more dimension but my style of embellishing really needs to have all three layers(top, batting and back) in place. It can get kind of heavy so these blocks are not suited for that. However, when I get the four pieces back we are free to finish them how we want to. That should be fun!

I really did enjoy this. It took me out of my comfort zone and I learned a couple things while doing it. Can't get better then that!