WHISPER CHALLENGES

Fantasy Flowers 2011

For the past two years, the Studio Art Quilters Association (www.saqa.com) has organized a challenge based on the old "whisper" or "telephone" game we played as kids: the one where someone starts by whispering a short message to a person, then that person whispers the message to the next person, and so on. By the time it gets to the end of the line of people, the message has changed quite a bit.

SAQA members signed up for the challenge and the facilitator organized groups of 8. Each person was assigned a month that they would complete their quilt. She then provided a picture to give to the first person in the groups.(the picture was not seen by anyone else in the group) Their job was to complete a quilt based on the picture. When finished, they sent their quilt to the next person in the group who then made a quilt inspired by the quilt she was sent. This process went on for 8 months. At the next quarterly meeting the quilts were shown to members, who got to see the amazing difference in the groups and how interpretations differed between the participants.

I was last in line for the 2011 challenge, which began as a not so exciting photo of an under water scene of green and brown rocks with a crab . The quilt that was sent to me had a green background with blue flowers floating diagonally over it. I latched on to the flower theme and designed my own flowers from scraps of hand painted and screen printed fabric. "Fantasy Flowers" ended up looking like water flowers, I think.

"Desert Dwellers" 2010

The 2010 challenge began with a not so exciting picture of a desert garden. When the preceding quilt sent to me was a beautiful piece with a diagonally pieced blue sky and a pipe organ cactus with a bird in a nest in it. I focused on the cactus and used digitally enhanced photos printed on fabric and built a collage on a painted canvas background. The reveal for this group of quilts was just as interesting; our group went from desert scenes to hot air balloons!