I enjoyed reading a recent response to “A Quirky Question” on the Martingale blog.
The question was: “Have you ever made an ugly quilt?” and the winner’s response was an eye opener.
She finished her response with: ” ….. Ugly can serve a purpose because I won’t stress over damaging an ugly quilt. Twenty years later, it is still holding strong!”
This jogged my memory of a challenge that I entered when I first started patchwork.
Way back then (1991), living in a remote community without access to any patchwork, or even fabric, shops it was a challenge to source fabric, so our small patchwork group decided to share our stash in an unusual way.
We had an “ugly fabric” challenge.
We each had to contribute a piece of fabric that we didn’t particular like … a piece that we considered to be ugly!
Everyone’s fabric went into a basket and we then had to choose a fabric that we liked, and make up a block for a shared quilt.
It was amazing … everyone found at least one piece of fabric that they liked, and the finished quilt looked quite good.
Beauty (& ugly) really was in the eye of the beholder.
In fact the quilt looked good enough to raise over $300 for charity when it was raffled for a $1.00 per ticket.
Sadly, the photo has faded so I can’t share that quilt with you, but making it did give me a fascination for quilt challenges.
The next quilt challenge that I joined was with the neighbouring patchwork group (260km away).
We each purchased one metre of bright, wildly striped, fabric with an instruction to feature the fabric in a quilt design of our own choice.
I cut the fabric into 4 1/2″ stripes, and then fussy cut triangles, using a technique that had been described by Jan Urqhart in the Down Under Quilts magazine.
This method of cutting a striped fabric created 12 triangles, enough to piece the centre and points of one six pointed star from each stripe.
I took the instruction to feature the fabric in the quilt to heart, and used every centimetre of fabric in the quilt.
Sadly, I don’t get that many challenge quilts finished these days but I am trying to keep up with our office Round Robin Challenge.
We would love to hear about your Challenge Quilts, so write a comment, and share the story.