I am part of an online quilt group. We call ourselves RBQ (rather be quilting) and for a dozen people who have rarely met each other we have stuck together through thick and thin for quite a few years now. Rather Amazing, actually. We are all Canadians but live from one end of our country to the other, though most of us live in the west.
Now this year we have agreed upon a Challenge for our group--a fairly common challenge amongst quilters, but none the less I have never before accepted this type of challenge. The Challenge is to complete a list of UFO's. We each submitted our list that needs to see progress. I do not commit however to actually finishing every project, because 2 of them are ongoing and who knows they may never actually be done. My Quilted Diamonds Quilt and Hexagon Stars, both of which are hand piecing projects. Every once in a while I take one or the other along with me for long car rides or other activities that really require nothing from me but to be there -- like holidays on resort beaches (which I have not as yet had the priviledge of doing) so perhaps that is why it is not yet done?
Today, I have completed one of the projects from my Challenge list. It is an "I Spy" quilt. A number of years ago, I signed up for a 6" charm swap on the internet, all fabrics to be child friendly prints. Puppies and clowns, chickens and scorpions, dinosaurs and tractors -- on my quilt, 63 squares in all. Now this quilt has been layered and basted since about August 09, but for some reason it sat in a corner while I put together and finished up two quilts for christmas, 36 dinner napkins as christmas gifts, 40 change purses for a craft fair, along with a dozen or so other small projects.
This UFO challenge finally inspired me to unfold the "I Spy" and get the sewing machine its walking foot and free motion 'darning' foot in gear...
The centre of the quilt is a simple cross hatch, which I find pleasing to look at and usually do on most any quilt with squares and triangles. The outer border is a adaptation of a continuous line quilting pattern that I saw, somewhere on the internet as an all over pattern, to me it looks like a cabbage rose so that is what I call it -- a bit finicky to keep each one at a uniform size but after a few practice ones, I seemed to have managed to have kept it nicely even--there is only one that is not quite as nice as it could be, but since it is a Challenge quilt - I Challenge you to find it!
