My guild decided last year to participate in the AQS Ultimate Guild Challenge. We voted on the theme - My Checkered Past, a self portrait. It had to have a checkerboard motif in it somewhere, and be within a certain size range, etc. For more details and rules, look on our
website's challenge page.
Here's my entry - I made my self portrait out of quilting supplies and sewing notions. Her nose is supposed to be a thimble, a men's cotton shirt at the local Goodwill made great 3 inch rulerpants, and the scissors, iron, pressor feet, and cutter blades are made of silvery ironing board cover fabric. I took a hammer and nail to an old bobbin, tore it apart, and put the discs from that for her eyes. Click on the pic for more detail.
I had the hardest time trying to get it to be 36 x 45 finished, and still get the checkerboard 9-patch border to work out light corners to dark corners even/odd all the way around the quilt. I also wanted the top/bottom and side borders to be the same size. If it hadn't been for EQ, I'd have given up!
We had about sixteen quilters in the guild enter the contest, and my entry was one of the eight picked to go on to the show in Nashville. :) Here's one where you can see the entire quilt, next to a couple of the other entries:
I'm not much of a quilter, so that part was the worst for me. I had to force myself to start it, to put the needle to my fabric sandwich, so afraid of ruining it. If I'd been able to send it out, I'd have asked for a nice tiny stipple on the white instead of the big loopy lines I put there.
When it comes back, I'd like to clutter it up a little by sewing on some little orphan blocks over her head (like she is thinking of quilts) and using the quilt as a showcase for some of the pins and buttons I've collected.
Now that this challenge is done, it's back to the jewel box quilt. I've been swimming in hundreds of 3½ half square triangles for it. I've almost got my 200+ bright-to-white ones done, but only 150 or so of the bright-to-blue ones. :)
