Six years is a long time to stick to one format for what is, by it’s own description, supposed to be a challenge. There comes a time when staying the course has the potential to foster staleness and inhibit creative stretching. It becomes harder to envision new ideas in fresh ways and to explore techniques outside of a prescribed 12″x12″ box. The solution? Well, she who makes the rules may break the rules, and so as a group, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

For this latest challenge, each participant was free to choose her own theme and to make a quilt without any size restrictions. Complete freedom! The only rule going forward is that each quilter has to repeat her theme in 3 variations over 3 challenges…but even the variations have no restrictions!

Let’s dive right into the quilts…

Candy decided to throw a bunch of scraps on her work table and see what she could make of them. Whatever happened, happened. This stunning quilt is the result and her serendipitous method has us eagerly anticipating what she might create using her next ‘whatever’ method.

Jean wrote a telling sentence on the back of her quilt, “And when her world shattered, she saw love and light.”

Cath has something up her sleeve and is leaving all of us to guess her theme. The soft colors and tiny details…hmm.

Alison took inspiration from a touching rendition of “It Is Well With My Soul”, played at the funeral service of a young friend. Her friend was part Hawaiian and loved music…and Alison’s affection for him was evident in her emotional presentation of this lovely quilt.

I have a large vintage photograph collection and this challenge presented the perfect opportunity to use them. I wanted to portray these girls in a way that made them relevant to today’s culture and also in a way that illuminated the potentially dismissive captions that might have been used to describe them. No ‘sweet’ or ‘pretty’ for these girls, they are much too strong and too aware for that!

Brenda teased that she could do ‘strawberry margaritas, peach margaritas, classic margaritas’ – the options were innumerable – since, as you can probably guess, she loves a good margarita. She stayed true to her theme by depicting a 3-dimensional agave plant. I may have an idea of where she’s going next with this. 😉

Our themes have been revealed and now we’re on to the second piece in each series. The same…but different. Now there’s a challenge!