Quilters Crossing Challenge

Okay I spent all of Christmas week consumed with one customer's quilt that I am really enjoying, whenever I was not engaged with my family. 

 It is almost done. I dare say today it will be....or tomorrow. 

We'll see.

It is just one of those quilts where I look at it and say, "oh maybe a little more here" and off I go, adding more quilting.

I posted the current Quilters Crossing Challenge on New Year's morning. The sample:

I made for my mother a few years ago as a gift. We had seen this challenge done with gift bags at the Nashville quilt show a few years ago and we thought it was a neat idea. There is a lot of art on display in the greeting card aisle I found when I went to make a selection! 

It was really fun to try and figure out how to make everything in fabric. I liked the creative problem solving. 

For example, the part of the card below where the words are was the exact same weird green color as the background but a little lighter. Odds were not good that I could match it.

 I ended up flipping the piece of fabric I used for the background over and embroidered the words on the wrong side to get the lighter color. I felt rather brilliant for a moment ( it takes very little to please me it seems...)

I used beading to achieve the sparkly effects and flower details.

I used quarter inch fusible bias tape for the branches of the plant and a metallic thread to do a tiny zig zag around all the fused teal flower petals.

My mom displays the quilt with the greeting card which she framed so you can enjoy the comparison.

I hope we get a lot of participation for this challenge. We have the cut off date at the end of March so that anyone in The Woodlands or Tri-County Quilt Guild will have already had their show quilts done and have time to work on this. I am sure the date doesn't accommodate everyone but we tried to consider the quilting schedule of the bulk of our customers.