Michael Miller

makes fabric, mostly quilting cottons.  They want to get their fabrics into the hands of quilters so they have given yardage to the Modern Quilt Guild to distribute to local guilds, to see what people will come up with.  This is my second challenge.  Last year I made a pillow with my Madrona Road fat eighths. There is a photo of it at the project picture for my Quilted Pillow workshop. To jog your memory....

This year I was unable to attend the meeting of the Seacoast Modern Quilt Guild, of which I am a (frequently non-attending) member, when they showed their finished challenge projects. But I did finish one.  I rather like these challenges because I work well with forced restriction of materials. I don't function well when sent to the fabric store with unlimited funds (as if...) and no particular idea in my head.  But give me (literally hand me) a bunch of scraps (or fat eighths in this case) and I can fashion something.  This time I played with a tutorial I found on St. Louis Folk Victorian for a Modernized Disappearing Nine Patch.  Very cool...

This is what I came up with.... I only used the fabrics given to me, plus about a yard of Essex Linen (perhaps my favorite fabric) in Natural. As an experiment I did not wash any of the fabrics before I sewed this up.  I always wash my fabrics first.  Honestly it didn't look that different before and after as compared to washed fabrics.  But I just like the way washed fabrics feel, its as if the wash and dry cycle tightens them up just that much, and I like that feeling....  Up above the two pix on the left were before it was awaited (and in natural light) and the two on the right were after (and under fluorescents).  Just so you can get feeling for the whole thing, here is the full image again...  Forgive me the wrinkles, I should have ironed it first, but I was lazy.

I like the DM9P, gonna do another one...  Thank you Michael Miller for pushing my quilting along....