The Road Less Traveled

 

I joined an online art quilt group I discovered on Facebook and they have challenges every two months. The current quilt deadline is today and the theme of the challenge was called "The Road Less Traveled." The size of the quilts are 11.5" x 16.5" and we reveal our work on the blog site today at www.aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/artquiltsaroundtheworld and on our own blogs.

So what did I decide to do-I thought about what the road less traveled meant to me and it meant to do the unconventional things that other people aren't doing. I love to do portrait quilts and thought how can I combine portrait quilts with this challenge? Last February I was having the winter blahs and dyed my normally brown with blonde highlighted hair hot pink-that was not really conventional for a middle aged woman living in the Upper Midwest in a small town!! So that's how it started with a fun self portrait with my hot pink hair!! I do add the victory roll to my bangs so that was normal for me and hand stitched one of my pink hair clips that I actually use in my hair to the roll for a 3D look.

While I was thinking about this project, I attended the Wisconsin Quilt Expo in Madison WI in early September and Chris Daly had a booth in which she sold hand dyed fabrics. I purchased some bright hand dyed velvets including a hot pink. I added this velvet as the hot pink hair highlights which was the second "road less traveled" idea of velvet not cotton for this quilt. It was easy to fuse and to work with on my sewing machine.

Then my friend Faith who is in her early twenties, and very fun and inspirational, is all about using Duct Tape for projects. I watch her make wallets, flowers etc. out of Duct Tape and found this 1970s themed tape and decided to use it as the binding on this quilt. Number three of the "road less traveled" is no traditional binding but use Duct Tape instead. I began with the pink hair idea and it percolated into more ideas!! I had fun with this project-which to me is the whole point of these challenges to explore new ideas but if it is not fun why bother!!

I'm not sure the quilt judges would love the duct tape binding if I were to enter this in a quilt show but it is an art quilt!!

The next challenge is called "macro" which will be interpreted as a close-up view of something and I have an idea and it is not a portrait quilt and it is due Nov. 30th.