Hitting the Blocks

Phew! After over 75 different designs and almost 200 hours of hand-stitching, my quilt is in the mail (please, please USPS, do not be late!!!).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Hoffman Challenge, here is the company’s own definition:

“Every year, a team from Hoffman Fabrics chooses an upcoming fabric design and then issues a challenge to quilt, clothing, doll and accessory makers to create an original item using the fabric…Judging emphasizes originality and creativity, creative use of the challenge fabric as it realtes to other fabrics, visual impact, and workmanship.”

My original idea involved a geisha wearing a challenge fabric kimono. Much to my chagrin, I discovered (after several dozen design tries) that one of the challenge winners from a few years ago had the same idea. Sigh. So, I pitched that and tried again. What I finally came up with was a giant urn with cherry blossoms in it, sitting on a window sill. By the time I was finished, I’d done hand-piecing, hand-quilting (tear-away stabilizer is my new best friend), 3-D applique, homemade piping, yo-yo flowers, and beadwork. Oh, and poetry writing too. Mixed media indeed!

Here’s the underlying design made using EQ6 (oh, marvelous, marvelous EQ!). I settled on using the traditional Storm at Sea block, mainly because I love the movement it creates. The cream-colored blocks are where I appliqued a huge vase.

The pieced and quilted block. Those little triangles were way too tiny for me to do on the machine (well, I could have, but hand-piecing was actually much easier). The “ribbons” created with the cream and brown fabrics are outlined with quilting. That was originally all that I was going to do, but then I did the flowers and leaves and finally the diamonds.

Each of the brown and cream diamonds is quilted with a spiral design in variegated browns. Okay, I confess–I had to quilt them because they were puckering funny. Mainly that cream with the brown veining. Serves me right for using a substandard fabric in with all the nice designer stuff.

The center square is fussy cut from the challenge fabric and quilted with a cherry blossom in variegated pinks.

I also quilted pale green leaves in the two leaf fabric squares.

Only after I finished the quilt and wrote a tanka for it did it occur to me that the spirals were like storm winds blowing the leaves and blossoms about.

Continues in next post

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Blocks, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.