This is the week that Quilting Gail has designated for challenge participants to post pictures of their finished quilts. The Stay At Home Round Robin challenge is in its fourth year. It’s been a fun ride for me, and pure pleasure to see the work of other quilters as they add a border week by week.
It started for me when I chose a center block from a group of experiments that I did almost five years ago. Back then I was teaching fiber arts to a group of home-schooled children. One week I had the students experiment with fabric paint on pieces of a cut-up sheet. The panel I used in my SAHRR came from the example I made, to show the students some of the possibilities of fabric paint.
Four colors of paint were applied in bands horizontally across the fabric and allowed to bleed together. When the panel dried, it looked like a mountain scene to me. I enhanced the image with opaque white paint, paint pens and stencils of pine trees.
The painted panel set the color palette for my SAHRR.
That choice led me on a path which resulted in a quilt about migration. For some time, I had been toying with designing and sewing paper pieced butterfly blocks. Could I make a quilt about the monarch annual migration to Mexico? The time I spent researching this migration led me to think about the wider issues of habitat loss and climate change. Now I had a broader story to tell with my quilt.
The weekly challenges offered by SAHRR quilters helped me to build some structure around my ideas. For that I am grateful.
Here are some close-ups of a few details I added with applique and micron pens.
And here is my finished quilt:
Just a word about the materials used: I was determined to buy nothing for this project, making it entirely with stuff that I already owned. I mentioned the cut-up sheet. In addition, I recycled pieces of clothing such as dresses and men’s shirts. The main fabric, which was used as sashing, was also divided up and painted various colors to carry it into most of the borders. Ultimately, I did have to buy a few quarter yards of black patterned fabric and the quilt’s batting.
Thank you to organizer Quilting Gail and her fellow designers who put together this year’s SAHRR challenge. You can find their work here:
- January 22: 1st Round: Wendy @ Pieceful Thoughts of My Quilting Life
- January 29: 2nd Round: Anja @ Anja Quilts
- February 5: 3rd Round: Emily @ The Darling Dogwood
- February 12: 4th Round: Brenda @ Songbird Designs. Visit Songbird Designs to link up
- February 19: 5th Round: Gail @ Quilting Gail
- February 26: 6th Round: Kathleen @ Kathleen McMusing
- March 18: Parade: showing all of your finished SAHRRs!
And to see the finished quilts, follow this link.
https://fresh.inlinkz.com/party/7eab5849658e4307bf5cfcff8e69c998
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