I know I sound like a broken record, constantly repeating what a weird year 2020 was & how 2021 is turning out to be equally weird. But I think in all honesty everyone feels the same way.
It has just been a weird year. Even the excitement that I normally feel about Project Quilting is somewhat muted & missing something. Everything feels like we are in some sort of Limbo Land. Waiting and anticipating...but exactly what is it we are waiting for?
While we are all clearly in the same pandemic, each of us has our own waiting and wanting. Which granted that is how life is even when we aren't in a pandemic, but for some reason add the whole insanity of last year & the whole crazy of this year so far, and it just feels extra weird.
One of my daughters sent this meme to me and told me it was the spitting image of ME over the past year...LOL...she is right!
So when the challenge for this week came out, I had a difficult time trying to decide if I wanted to be excited about it or not. The challenge was to create something using the quilt block pattern, "Snails Trail" or in some books called the "Monkey Wrench".
Well the monkey wrench pattern I thought of was this one, and I have never liked this quilt block.
So then when I saw the Snail Trail and that is was also called a monkey wrench, I just thought "weird".
After reading some of the posts from other quilters who had already started the challenge about how challenging the block was, I thought great. I don't like following rules, measuring and cutting. I am a lazy, chop up the fabric and sew, quilter. But I decided maybe this would be good for me to follow a pattern for a change. There are as many ways to make the block as there are variations of quilts using the block. Some very basic and others which are just incredible.
I think the pattern when done in two colors looks like those funny monkeys in the "Barrel of Monkeys" game. All just stringing along hooked together with their arms and tails.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was envisioning a barrel of monkeys quilt, in fact I even imagined that somewhere in my stash I had monkey fabric. I did not, but trust me, I will be ordering some. I decided I was going to make my block into a red monkey swinging through the trees. Just one and keep it simple.
The block turned out to be easier to make than it looks, and since there are so many different ways to make it, I think I would like to explore some of the methods when I make my monkey quilt in the future.
I found a pattern that was supposed to be foundation piecing, but decided that was too much work and just cut the triangles and squares and made blocks, without the foundation part of it.
As you can see, this is not a red monkey, and there are no trees.
If you have a fabric stash, you know what it's like to dig through all that fabric and get distracted from your original plan. First I found a fun bright colored tropical print that I decided would make really cool snails, so I tossed the monkey out the window and decided to go with a snail instead.
I dug around some more and found a pretty salmon color to use for the back ground, but while digging for that, I came across this amazing piece of hand dyed fabric. I have no idea where it came from, but I wish I had about 10 yards of it instead of the one little fat quarter. It blended so beautifully with the salmon and I knew I had to use it. Of course when sewn together they almost blended too much, and I could no longer see a monkey or a snail. More like an amoeba.
If I wanted to impress you by pretending to be artsy and know what I was talking about, I would tell you that when I created my challenge piece I was trying to convey the feeling of a cosmic journey, an explosion of swirling star dust, the birth of a cell and the sense that all life is connected though our shared conscience, adding an organic texture to my block using hand dyed fabric and thread painting that tied each piece of the larger block together....
But truth be told... I picked out two fabrics I really liked, sewed them together, decided they were just weird looking, and found some variegated thread that looked good on the fabric and then quilted them in the hopes that maybe it would look a little less weird and look a little more like "I planned it this way".
I bound my creation using a piece of brown leafy batik binding that was already cut and in my left over binding pile. My finished piece is 13 x 14. Not quite square...so weird.
I honestly wasn't sure about this challenge when I started. I was apprehensive about the imagined difficulty in the block itself. But after getting started and figuring out that to get it to sew together correctly I just needed to imagine it as a puzzle piece and follow the pattern layout. The possibilities with the block are endless.
So in keeping with the weird of the whole past 12 months, instead of a Snail Trail, or a Monkey Wrench, I created a uniquely strange - More Fun than a Barrel of Monkeys Amoeba Quilt.
Make sure you take a look at the other challenge quilts this week, it is really fun to check out the different ways people have interpreted the block pattern, from snails to witches hats, every idea under the sun!
They can be found on the Persimon Dreams Blog at kimlapacek.com under the Project Quilting tab.
