The Challenge

The quilt shop, The Gingerbread House, that hosts our quilt guild, peace by piece, sponsors a quilt challenge every year.  Each year Karen, the owner of The Gingerbread House, chooses a pattern, a color way, or certain fabric to be used in the challenge.  We receive the challenge at the October meeting and we have until the December meeting to submit our piece.

This year we received what Karen called, a crayon box, eight different fabrics (fat eighths) rolled up into crayons and packaged in a bag together.  The rules... We had to use each fabric.  That's it!  We could make anything, use any additional fabric, use any pattern.  We just had to use every fabric.

Now... I swear I took a picture of the crayon box and the fabric, but I can't find it!  And since my computer has died since we got it who know what happened to it!

I decided right away to make this a true challenge.  Not only did I want to meet the requirements of the challenge, but I wanted to make it a personal challenge by doing something I'd never done before.

I decided that I would make a "cross-stitch" or "postage stamp" quilt.  I found this really cute cross stitch pattern online and started to process of transferring to a grid for quilt.

I was using Excel to convert this too a quilt pattern.  So, when I lost my computer I lost this image and the excel file I was working on.  So I needed to go back to the drawing board.

I found several ideas.  I thought a bow tie would be cute.  I could do quit a few of them to make a table topper.

But this is just didn't meet the "do something I've never done" part of my personal challenge.

Then a saw a beautiful miniature quilt of falling leaves.  I thought, hmmm, that would work, I could have a background, a border, and six falling leaves.

This is not the miniature, I don't have a picture of that but you get the idea.  Right?

I felt like it met both the quilt challenge and my personal challenge.  I'd never made a miniature quilt before, nor had I ever taken a pattern and re-sized it.

I knew I had a pattern in a book somewhere so I started looking!  While I was looking I found a very different but perfect pattern.  I found it in a long forgotten book.  A friend gave it to me a number of years ago.  It has old quilt patterns "modernized".  The problem is that this was a used book she found at a garage sell, so all of the paper templates were missing.  This particular pattern basically said, cut a certain amount of template A, a certain amount of template B, and piece using photo for placement.  

Now that's a challenge!  My husband thought it would be perfect.   It shows the fabrics beautifully!  I've never done anything like this before, basically designing a quilt from a photo, using Y seams, and cutting 60 degree angles.  

I chose to make a 7 Sisters table topper.

Here are the eight fabrics.  I am very pleased!  I think it turned out great!  I found a boarder and binding fabric from the same line as the center star.  

What ya think?  I am very happy!!!!!

I also finished my Christmas Advent Calendar.  You can find the tutorial for this one at the Moda Bake Shop.  I gave one of these to my sister, my brother, and my mom.  Their calendars actually have numbers on them.  But I didn't end up having enough for mine.  By next year I will get numbers on it!