Lila’s Challenge

Lila's Challenge

One of the members of our art quilt group, Capital Region Textile Artists, brought some scrap kimono fabric to a meeting and challenge us to make a quilt using them. We finally convinced her that we should be allowed to add one or two of our own fabrics. She also stipulated that it should be in the dimensions of the golden mean-24″ x 14 1/2″ being one possiblity.
I grabbed about 5 fabrics and brought them home wondering how I was going to ever make these disparate fabrics work together. I finally decided to do a background of hexagons and got out the trusty calculator to figure out exactly how big each hexagon should be to come out close to the 24 x 14 1/2 inches. The dumb calculator didn’t work right and it was seriously smaller than the size desired. I finally decided to spread out the hexagons and fill in the spaces between with short strips of fabric left over from the kimono scraps. The whole top is fused to muslin, then the hexagons were satin stitched around the edges with invisible thread. So what started out as a mistake turned into a design triumph. The green silk fabric for the bamboo is the only fabric of mine that I used in the quilt. I found the pattern in a book from our guild library, although I simplified it for this quilt. I also hand stitched Japanese crest designs on two plain fabrics. I had bought the hanging rod several years ago at a store called Ten Thousand Villages and this seemed the perfect quilt to use it with. I learned a lot about how dissimilar fabrics can play very well together and plan to hang this quilt in a place I can enjoy every day-which probably means that something else comes down!

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