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.