All the Colors- Project Quilting 13.1

 Here we are again, another season of Project Quilting has begun. For some reason this year felt like it started earlier than it has in the past. I know it didn't but that is how my life has felt since January 1, 2021...a day late, a dollar short and just totally confusing.

The first challenge of the year always seems like its the one where we all need to really stretch our imaginations and dust off our creativity, so it's always nice when its an easy challenge...this one probably was for some people, but Sunday rolled around and it was announced that they were going to get the "fun stuff" out of the way and start the season with a Color Challenge. This one really was pretty simple because we were to use ALL of the colors, and that was it. No other rules on how we had to use the colors, or a theme, or a thought, just use lots of colors in whatever you decided to create. 

I hate the color challenges, just give me all the grey and brown, don't make me think inside a color wheel. My brain was still overdosing on the red, green, silver and white Christmas decor that I was surrounded by.

 The 5 weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years this past year were busy, crazy, hard, on the road, going, going, going weeks. Looking back it was basically a blur of family time, and driving.

New Years Day arrived and it was COLD, bone chilling cold, and I was TIRED. So I slept, and slept and slept. Then I woke up to discover that the day was now evening, so I just went back to bed and slept some more. I never sleep, I am a 15 minute napper at best, a night owl and I feel like I've wasted my day if I sleep past 6:30 in the morning. You know when you have slept really deeply or overslept and you wake up and feel sort of confused and disoriented, well that is how I felt on the 2nd when the challenge came out. Tired, cold and confused.  

So apparently that's what I decided to create, something just totally confusing, that made absolutely no sense to anyone even me. On Monday I dug through my stash and pulled some different colorful fabrics, no plan yet, but I still had a week.  

Before the season began I had thought of ideas I wanted to try in at least one of the challenges,  one of the ideas was creating some sort of mosaic using fabric. So I decided maybe this would be my mosaic since we were using as many colors as possible.

 Those of you who know me, know I love music and can find a song to fit anything that is happening in my life at any given time, so of course my mind went to "what song can I incorporate into this?"

I thought about doing something with the song "Wildflowers" by Tom Petty, but then I didn't really want to mosaic wild flowers, basically because I was lazy.

 I looked up songs with colors, and found a list of songs that had colors in their titles, and of course "Purple Rain" by Prince topped the list, then there was a song called "Orange Sky" by Alexi Murdoch and I thought maybe I could mosaic an orange sky and somehow incorporate a purple rain in. So now I had a plan. 

I found all the somewhat orange fabric pieces I had in my batik stash, cut them up into random pieces and put them on a white background so they looked like a mosaic, and stitched around them to hold them down. I didn't like the white so I used ink to color between the pieces. Then I added some purple strips to the top to represent my purple rain clouds. Then I thought well there are two colors, we are supposed to use ALL the colors. So I did a weird strip of bright colors along the bottom that looked like a stick of that fruit stripe gum we all thought was so great when we were 10, but really wasn't. 

Well the bottom of my project wasn't either so I knew I needed to figure out a way to help it. I found a fun piece of batik that had a bunch of different colors in it, so I added a bigger strip of that and left it so I could cut it and fringe it. Then I had the random idea to add a purple fringe to the top, which once I did, I did not like, so I sewed a piece of blue rick rack over it and trimmed it partially off. 

About this time is when I realized that the disorientated days were turning into a completely disorientated project. But I am always a believer in "making it work" and if I was going to create a mess, I was going to own it! LOL 

Somewhere in the trying to add more fringe to my mess to make it look less messy, I had this crazy idea that I should add some figures to the picture. 

A number of years ago my sister gave me these little red ceramic angel figurines that are kissing, in my mind I thought now that would incorporate red into my design and I needed some more colors...but then I looked at the figurines and decided this whole thing was going to confuse people anyway, I didn't need people to think I was completely off my rocker.

 So I found a picture of a silhouette of two girls holding hands with the sun under their raised hands and decided to do that. But then instead of just doing a sun, I saw a colorful scrap of batik that I thought would make a fun umbrella so I made them holding an umbrella since I still wanted to do my whole purple rain theme. I quilted the mosaic design and the girls onto a backing fabric and bound it with a colorful checkered batik. I could have been done here, but no. 

I was still struggling with the fringe situation, so I decided to fix that I would add more. I found a cool strip of red and purple zebra stripe and added a fringe of that to the top of my picture. Then I found an old vintage piece of black and white rick rack and added that to the bottom hoping it would hide the fact that I had used fruit stripe gum, it didn't, but then I decided (at the suggestion of my friend Scarlet who LOVED the sparkly tulle I had)  to layer tulle over the whole thing and then at the suggestion of Scarlets mom, cut the tulle away from the little girls and umbrella, thinking that would maybe give it some depth. I added an extra large folded piece of tulle to the bottom colored strips to sort of mute them down. Then decided why not add more fringe? LOL

So I took a piece of blue fabric and sewed another wonderful piece of fringe on top of the tulle to hide that crazy green, yellow and orange striped mess.  I also twisted the bottom batik fringe and added some bright colored buttons for weight. 

Before all the tulle was added I decided to sew little purple sequin stars around the mosaic back ground, and then I had a brilliant idea to take beading wire and create a rain effect with wire and beads. I was going to just cover the whole purple area with this wonderful idea. This is where the dream became a nightmare and I decided 8 wires were enough! While digging for purple beads I found a fun shell button shaped like a star and added that, which of course made me think of the song "Yellow" by Cold Play.

At some point since it was now Thursday I needed to stop adding fringe and decide there was an ending....So that's it, my "All the Colors" challenge piece for Project Quilting 13.1  

Random, a bit disorientated, unique, with lots of fringe and a little sparkle!