The Husband’s Challenge

A local fabric store has a fat quarter sale on Jan 1st. Each fat quarter is $1 but you have to buy a minimum of 50. I mentioned the sale to my husband and commented that I wasn’t sure I would find 50 fat quarters I wanted. He suggested we go anyway and he could pick out several that I would then have to make into a challenge quilt – I wasn’t prepared for his selections – 10 rather ugly fabrics!

The coy, planes, and zig zag fabrics were particularly troubling. Not to mention the lack of a unifying color scheme.

I sat on the fabrics for several months to work on more appealing projects while my husband lamented that I hadn’t completed his challenge. This past weekend I started ripping the fat quarters into strips along with several others I dubbed as ugly from my stash and a chunk happier bright scraps from recent project.

I stitched the strips randomly into 12” wide pieces that I then cut them into varying sizes to piece together into 12” x 24” blocks of random rectangles. As I stitched, I kept thinking it looked like visual vomit, but now done I’ve grown a bit fond of it.

Husband’s Challenge, 63.5” x 70.5”

I didn’t have quite enough pieced to make the 6th row so I made it 6” high to get the needed width. The small or tiny size of the pieces helps to hide the ugly nature of the fabrics especially when paired with some solids and pleasing prints.

I tossed it over my kitchen table and my husband commented it made a nice tablecloth. It would hide stains. We’ll see how it looks once quilted.

Now I need to figure out what to back this with. Should the back be a solid or fairly plain print or should I use up my batik stash that I want to get rid of to make a crazy patchwork back?