Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Hoffman Challenge 2013

It's done!  It's mailed!  I'm freeee!  I feel like I've been working on this forever ... it's completely applique and seemed to be never-ending but now it is completed and in the mail to Colorado. 
So ... the feature fabric this year  is called Peacock Gold.  I loved it from the moment I saw it, it's filled with my favorite colors -- shades of blues and green on tan!  As soon as I saw it I knew the flowers would make great 3-d fish scales.  The leaves, of course, make great leaves.  Every year I take apart the images in the featured fabric and blend them in with other fabrics to make something else ... and every year I lose.  Inevitably the winners have used the flowers as flowers ... like just cut out great big frickin flowers and sew them on as is!  Yes, the resultant quilts are beautiful and there is a lot of other work in them besides the flowers, but it always seemed like cheating to me.  This year I decided to make an exception and used some leaves as leaves ... turned out pretty good, though it still feels like cheating.
Here you can see where I actually used the focus fabric ... fish scales, eye, yin yang circle, leaves, flower center, and the little green thingies on the outside of each flower.  

Colors always manage to elicit an emotional response in me, and no doubt many others.  To me shades of blues, greens, teals, aqua all inspire a feeling of calm.  The fish in the centre represents the yin yang.   In conjunction with that I put a watery wavy circle around it.  Then surrounding that are the flowers and feathers.  I quilted it all with variegated thread ... beige in the middle, green in the feathered area, and blue in the outer area. 
I find it nearly impossible to make an appliqued quilt perfectly symmetrical and even.  At a glance it looks very even and lined up, but when you get right into the nitty gritty of it, it's very much NOT, thus I named it "Unbalanced". 
All hand appliquéd and hand quilted, of course.  It should get to its destination just in the nick of time .... wish me luck!