Scraps of ugly fabric

I’m part of the West Side Quilters.  Our meetings often start with some sort of a warm up game.  About a year ago, we had to bring in a yard of ugly fabric.  The game commenced, and we tore the fabric in half, passed it around, it got torn in half again, we kept passing the pieces around, and we all ended up with different sized pieces of ugly fabric.  We were then challenged to do something beautiful with the fabric.  We were “allowed” to add a neutral fabric if needed.

So of course I envisioned a postage-stamp style border (if the fabric’s ugly, cut it smaller until it’s not ugly anymore) around a very large blank area of a neutral fabric, where I could feature some nice quilting.  I decided to  limit myself to fabric I already had.  For some reason, I felt compelled to use as much of the ugly fabric as possible, which made for a fairly large postage-stamp border.  I ended up using two different neutrals for the central area.

Above you can see part of the border, and some of my design work.

The quilting design was starting to come together. A few first for me – I’d never done some of the motifs above.

And here’s the finish product.  It was an interesting challenge:  take a bunch of ripped rejects, and do something beautiful.