The Last Project Quilting Challenge of 2023 14.6

This week is the last challenge of this season, and it was almost the challenge that wasn't in my sewing room! 

The challenge for the week was to conquer a fear or create something to represent a fear we might have, maybe in life, maybe in the quilting world. As always the sky is the limit.

When the challenge was announced I was completely blank, usually I have some little idea or a glimmer of creativity after I read the challenge rules. But this week nothing.

As far as quilting goes, I can't say I have a lot of fears, I have things I don't like to do, such as following patterns, (although I love buying patterns), or using rulers to quilt with my long arm machine, but they aren't fears, they are just things I don't like to do. 

In art I am not afraid to try new things, give me all the supplies and if something doesn't work the way I think it should, I will just try it again differently. 

I have a fear of heights, and confined spaces, but those things don't completely freeze me, and if I need to get on a ladder to clean a window, I have a really nice tall ladder. 

In honesty I am probably more of a worry wart, and create scenarios in my mind to worry about. But I just don't have time to sit around and be fearful about things in life, cautious and very careful, but not fearful.

So the week went along with no idea and I thought maybe this would be the one challenge I would just skip, but then I felt maybe that was just being lazy and I could do something.

I finally decided my biggest "fear" is the fear of saying NO. I know I don't like to tell people no, and too many times it has created more work or more stress than I need in my life. The past 3 years have given me a lot of time to think about the things I want to do in life, the people I want to be around, and the situations I want to have to deal with, and NO has become a really great word in my vocabulary. I may not say it aloud as much as I should, but I have learned to internally say NOPE NOT DEALING WITH THIS BULLSHIT- and my life is so much happier. 

So I decided I would create a quilt representing a soft place to land for the people in life who don't like to hear the word NO. 

I have so much scrap batting and I decided I would cut strips of batting and quilt as I sewed onto a piece of muslin. I think I just like to cut strips and sew them so much and this was just a relaxing way to get rid of some of my batting scraps. Then I cut out the word ON from a piece of fabric with the word PONY on it...at our house we only say YES to PONIES, so I turned the letters upside down to make the word NO.

 I then used batting to sew a pretty little flower around the NO, and a happy little cloud at the bottom of the stem so it would make it even easier for people who don't like to hear the word NO to land softly. LOL  

I used more batting strips to bind it, and it was done! My finished quilt is 4 x 10 inches.  

Project Quilting 14.5- Sew NOT a SQUARE!

 This is the 5th week of Project Quilting, the year has been a busy one and we are only into the first week of March. I'm not sure if it feels like the months have been speeding by or if they are dragging. Today we woke up to more snow and wind, which seems to be a weekly occurrence. We have a couple of days of beautiful sunny snow melting weather, and then it hits again. I think I can speak for everyone in South Dakota when I say I am ready for sunshine and green grass! But if you missed it, this week we had a night with some spectacular Northern Lights, so even with the cold and never ending snow, it hasn't been completely awful! 

The challenge this week was "Sew NOT a Square", we could make anything we wanted, as long as there was nothing square in it and the finished project was not square, this also meant that even if our project was circular in shape or rectangular, there were to be NO SQUARES in it anywhere. 

I felt like I needed to challenge myself a little bit and do something I have never done before but always wanted to try which is English Paper Piecing. I bought a kit a number of years ago and started it, but put it aside after I cut out the templates and never did anything with it. Of course I knew I was not going to find that kit in the one week time frame, so I decided to look for free patterns on the internet and try to find something that fit the NO SQUARE rule. 

I found a fun pattern on a blog called lillyella.blogspot.com, the pattern was a little table topper and she had sewn it in Christmas fabrics. I decided to do it in Halloween fabrics mainly because I had a fat quarter bundle of fabric in a handy spot and I wouldn't have to go searching. 

This was a learning experience for me, and what I think I learned was that I do not like hand sewing or English paper piecing. Maybe I would like it if I tried it again, but I am not sure I will try it again! 

I printed the pattern on a lightweight card stock, but feel that maybe just typing paper would have worked better. It was hard to sew the little pieces together with the card stock. I chose to use a glue stick instead of basting my paper to the fabric and my glue stick must have been super sticky glue because I could hardly get the paper off when I was done!

 I used a grey thread because the majority of the fabric was a silver grey, but the stitches looked messy on the orange and purple, so I think if a person were doing something small you would want to use better matching threads. I even watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to EPP and I still had trouble stitching things nicely.  I love hand binding quilts but hand sewing these little pieces was just a mess! I did not enjoy it at all! 

I decided because the stitching looked so fragile after pulling out the paper templates it would be best to zig zag on all of the seams, so I used a bright purple thread and sewed the finished piece onto a scrap of batting, I then used a piece of black Halloween fabric and sewed the front and back right sides facing to make a little casing, then left a space open so I could turn it, iron it all really well, and then used the purple thread and did a blanket stitch around the outside edge. 

I felt like it needed to be tacked down so I did some little knots in random areas just to hold the two sides. I wish I had a spider button or two just to add a little extra touch. I think I am going to try and enlarge the patter and use it as a template to cut larger pieces and sew on my machine, because I think its a really cute little pattern, but I would rather not spend a week stressing over knotted thread and sloppy stitching.

 

It was done! So NOT a square!