Choose your own adventure!

Inspiration can come in many different ways.   This year, our little modern quilt guild had an interesting activity.  Over 8 months, we were given block patterns.  They had a suggested size, but you could make them any size you wanted in any quantity you wanted.   The organizers kept referring to “Choose your own adventure!” which reminded several of us of the Oregon Trail computer game.  One friend leaned over the first night and said, “but what if I don’t want dysentery?”.  That put the game front of mind for me and I remembered the color of green letters on a black background as I worked through that game a long time ago.

I decided to go with a cream background, just for the sake of contrast in the quilt, but otherwise I stuck to a palette of greens for the blocks themselves.   As a shock to me, I actually kept up with the blocks each month and when it came time to lay them out, I knew I wanted the quilt to be on point, so I decided to use graph paper and pencil to figure out my layout, and translate the squares of the graph paper into 2″ squares of fabric for the background.  I do a lot of layouts on the computer but I was at a retreat and sometimes good old-fashioned paper is just the way to go.   I worked hard at that retreat, figuring out how to cut the design into sections that I could piece and slowly assemble into the full quilt.  When it came to quilting, I briefly considered an E2E design that had Conestoga wagons in it but that seemed to be a bit on the nose so I chose something less distracting and matched my thread to the background.   I am more than pleased with the result, to the point that I am going to enter this quilt into QuiltCon. (I don’t ever expect to get juried in, but it is a huge step forward for me to even enter something I’ve made.  QuiltCon favors self designed quilts vs using someone else’s pattern so I’m pushing myself in that direction more and more).

I had so much fun on this adventure.  I liked the path I took.  I liked the community of quilters in the guild who were working on the blocks, we had a lot of people who kept up month to month, way more than I expected.   I have seen several other completed projects from this event, and they are all wonderfully unique, even though we started with the same set of patterns.  It’s just a little reminder to myself to get outside of my comfort zone a bit, to push myself to try something where I am not sure what the outcome will be and to make something that I’ve visualized, vs something that I’ve already seen completed.  I had a great time and I didn’t get dysentery either!!!