Mining for Diamonds- PQ 13.4 "You can call me Queen Bee"

The challenge this week for Project Quilting was announced the day before Valentine's Day and it was competing with the Super Bowl and the Olympics. I thought maybe one of those events would play a role in what the challenge would be, but other than diamonds being a symbol of LOVE, I was pretty wrong! 

The theme for the 4th challenge of this season is "Mining for Diamonds". We were challenged to create a quilt that was inspired by diamonds. As most quilters know the diamond shape is pretty common in many quilt patterns, so we had no excuse to come up with something, even just a simple square in a square block, which is also known as "diamond in the rough".

 It's funny that in so many of the challenges this season someone says, I just made that, or the project I made last time would have been perfect for this. I laughed when the challenge came out because a season or two ago we had a challenge called "Craving Chocolate" and I created a chocolate diamond using chocolate candy wrappers, this would have been perfect, but I was not going to have a repeat of the two of us eating chocolate candy by the bag so I could have enough foil to create another diamond! 

I spent Sunday evening looking at ideas for quilt patterns using diamonds, and other diamond ideas. I really like the diamond in the rough pattern and recently quilted a wonky block quilt that used that pattern. I thought maybe I could do a table runner or something simple and incorporate a wonky diamond block. 

But my mind works in mysterious ways, and when an idea comes to me, I just have to fly with it. While looking for patterns and thinking about diamonds, I kept thinking about the song 'Royals' by New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde. Now the song has the word diamond in it probably 3 times, and really has nothing to do with mining for diamonds, but I couldn't get the song out of my head and decided this was it. One of the rules of the challenge is that as long as we could explain how our project was inspired by diamonds we could do anything we wanted. 

If you listen to the video a couple of times my project will make sense...or not...LOL :)

              

I decided this challenge I was going to paint my main design and then do some diamond in the rough blocks to go with it. So on Monday evening while we watched the snowboarding competition I started my little design. 

 I then dug through my stash and found some scraps that fit my color scheme and stitched together my wonky blocks. I quilted around the design and attempted to quilt my blocks to look like diamonds. 

I decided I needed something bright and flashy to represent the diamond on the crown and sceptre, so I sorted through my button tin hoping I would find a button or two with a rhinestone on it, all I could find was one lone little stone at the bottom of the tin, so I glued that to the crown and embellished it with gold beads. I knew there were some bits and pieces of a geode we had cracked open in a jar in the kitchen, so I found one that fit the top of the sceptre, glued it with rhinestone glue and then used some invisible thread to secure it. There was a planned power outage in our area for Wednesday morning so I did the binding and hand sewing during that time and was done before noon! You can call me Queen Bee :) The finished piece is 9 x 22 and was painted using Tsukineko All Purpose Ink.