Project Quilting 9.3 Brave & Bold

Challenge 3 of Project Quilting Season 9 was announced on Sunday, and the theme for this week is Brave & Bold. The rules state that our project should be about bravery, maybe trying a new technique, honoring someone's courage, or conquering our own fears.

I had no idea what on earth I was going to do. I tossed a few ideas around with a couple of different people & they both told me the same thing, maybe I should create a project about myself and my journey with the big C.

For those reading this who don't know my story, seven years ago I was diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma, I honestly didn't even know I was sick until the medical professionals told me I was. Then in order to save my life they made me sicker. To me it was like being sick in reverse, you feel great and then they try to kill you, so you spend the next X amount of years trying to recover from the cure. The whole situation was an annoyance, something that was interfering with the things I wanted to do. I had just turned 50, we had 2 brand new grandsons, and another one on the way, we had a big family reunion planned for that summer, I had just borrowed money & invested in a dream of starting my own quilting business.  I didn't have time to be sick.

Looking back, I honestly don't feel like I did anything particularly brave, I just spent a lot of time being crabby & doing nothing... I never felt remotely courageous, not when I think about friends & relatives who fought the same battle for far longer than I ever did, and some of them did not survive. It was something I had to get through so I could hopefully move on to the things I wanted to do.

Thinking about it on Sunday just made me cranky & I thought maybe instead of creating a quilt this week I should put away Christmas decorations and clean my house. So I spent Sunday afternoon trying to organize the mess in the basement, did some laundry & of course watched football, but the whole time my mind was thinking about Project Quilting! I knew I had to create something and while my own journey was a starting point for what I wanted to create, it wasn't the story I was going to tell.

There are so many people in history who are remembered for their acts of bravery but all I could think about are the ordinary people who face their fears every day, even things that others might not see as acts of bravery but are very much acts of bravery to the people who are facing them. Through all this thinking a plan was brewing in my head & I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

The definition of brave is having or showing mental or moral strength to face  danger, fear, or difficulty: having or showing courage.

 The definition of courage is the ability to do something that frightens you. Strength in the face of pain or grief.

I started making a list of things I thought represented bravery and acts of courage people face every day. The list kept getting longer and longer & actually pretty depressing.

Thinking about how most of us wake up in the morning & face the new day with hope & anticipation, I wanted to use a piece of fabric that represented the dawn of a new day. I had a piece of silk that was left over from a project I had done earlier this year & I thought it was perfect for my plan.

On heavy card-stock I wrote down all the different acts of bravery or fears people face daily  and then using tulle as a way to hold it to the silk, I carefully quilted a spiral to hold down the words.

I wanted to create basically the image of a dark hole. I then used more tulle to create a binding for my quilt (mistake #1) This finished quilt was 14 x 14 inches.

Since I believe that any act of bravery we face is in a sense like stepping into the fire, I wanted to create the fire, and what better way to do that then to just start one!

Here you can see the first little bit of lighter fluid

I decided that I was going to burn my quilt, and since it was fabric I thought I better help it burn, so I poured lighter fluid on it (mistake #2)

Remember the tulle? Tulle doesn't burn, it melts...so I added more lighter fluid, a lot more lighter fluid (mistake #3) ...

Of course it is February and we are in South Dakota, so in other words it is very cold and it is very WINDY! Since I couldn't do this insane project inside the garage, I decided I would set the quilt in a pan & burn it down by the basement door out of the wind. I envisioned a nice little camp fire in a cookie sheet...well remember the lighter fluid? Lighter fluid makes a very fast burning fire that pretty much does whatever it wants.

All I could think of while pieces of the burning quilt swirled around me was oh my gosh #$%&  how am I going to explain this to the fire department?! But thankfully it burned fast and there was enough snow to put out any lingering sparks!

I really like the effect the pieces of card stock made when it was burned down to ashes, they were ashes themselves but they looked so crisp and white in comparison to the silk that had burned, it was almost like they had been wiped clean, which really tied in with the next 1/2 of my project.

The 2nd quilt I made I wanted to represent what happens after we go through the fire, how facing our fears makes us stronger. I thought about the mythical phoenix that burns and is reborn from it's own ashes. So I made another quilt and painted phoenix feathers around a print of my hand. The hand print I made from the ashes that were left from the fire of the first quilt.

I used a hand print symbol because to me things like ancient cave paintings of hand prints represent the person who made them in a really personal way. Almost like a signature saying This is Me, I was here. It's a weird thing I have about hand prints! LOL

I originally wanted to put a heart in the center of the print because I had a really cool saying that I was going to put there, but I forgot to save it on my computer & could not find it again! 

 Handling the quilt rubbed off a lot of the ashes and the quilting made it look like the scarecrows glove from the wizard of oz catching on fire! LOL

I added some flames to the hand using paint, tulle & plastic. Then I wrote words I thought represent some of the positive things that happen to us when we face our fears, and also a saying I really like about how each day we are born again, and what we do TODAY is what matters the most.
This little quilt is 10 x 10 inches.

I was done with all my pyromania & both quilts by Wednesday, which was a real record for me! Putting a blog post together is the hard part. I am glad I didn't let my bad mood about the past interfere with the challenge I really wanted to take part in this week and I am most happy I didn't start the prairie on fire!

Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.  ~Buddha