adventures of a quilting diva

Lest you think that I never quilt, here is one of my finished works. It was created for and donated to the Hancock Fabrics/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Quilt of Dreams fundraising contest.

This is my 2004 entry titled “The Rainbow Maker” It won best use of theme for the Southern California district and the judge’s choice in the National. I won 3 yards of quilting fabric a month for a whole year! Yippee!

The point is to make quilts based on pediatric cancer patients’ dreams and you get to use delicious fabrics based on the children’s artwork. Then after the contest some of the quilts are given to the patients and some are used for fundraising.

One child wanted to be a “rainbow maker” and that’s the dream I used for my inspiration. (the rainbow maker is in the center, painting the rainbow in the sky) My entry description contained an exerpt from a children’s story I am going to write someday and illustrate with quilt blocks much like the rainbow maker quilt (another UFO! LOL!)

It has dimensional appliques (stuffed with cotton batting, filler cord, etc.), chenille for the hair, and hand embroidery (I finally conquered the french knot–hooray!). I always wanted to try making chenille. I made up my own techniques for the applique. It took forever, but it was a really FUN quilt to make and I learned a lot.

The machine quilting was a real horror story. I had only about 1 or 2 days before the entry deadline and it was the first time I had ever used my set of quilting feet and hardly knew step one what to do. I turned it in to Hancock Fabrics literally minutes before the store closed on the very last day. I’ll spare you the gory details. Also you wouldn’t know it by looking, but the whole quilt top was wavier than a tsunami before I started quilting. TIP: hold your iron just above the quilt top and steam like crazy–works wonders to shrink out the waves.

I’m really glad I participated! Next time I’ll tell you about my 2005 entry.

happy quilting!