This month's expert is Cindy Needham. Cindy does beautiful whole cloth quilts from old, hand worked linens. I was lucky enough to attend her Open Thread Bar when she visited my guild last year. I had been periodically reading her blog, and it was there I first heard of this challenge. As a new machine quilter, it seemed to be just what I needed, so I signed up. I'm so glad I did!
Cindy's challenge had us draw a random squiggle pattern on our quilt sandwich and then fill in each resulting section with a filler of some type - repeating lines, circles, feathers, etc. For me, this was the most fun challenge to date. Somehow the smaller sections seemed less daunting than one big, open chunk of fabric. I would fill one section, stop, think about what to do next and where to do it, then quilt another. I liked trying to think of new ways to combine the options.
Actually, I started out drawing on paper, as I always do when there's a new pattern to learn. I was very happy with the drawings. Here are a few:
After doing a number of these (each of which took me more than an hour to draw - I had to think a lot) I finally worked up the courage to go to the fabric. I made some marks and then filled them in. This is the result:
