A Page 38 Challenge

Our most recent challenge in my Fiberistas group had a unique twist. Each member grabbed an old magazine from Barb’s overflowing pile. We then turned to page 38 (that number was chosen at random), and we challenged each other to make a quilt inspired by some aspect of our page. Here’s mine:

I wasn’t excited about the block on my page, but I found the circle inside the star intriguing. We picked our pages back in December of 2019, and ideas began to rattle around in my brain. Then I went to Japan! For my newer blog readers, you can read all my posts about that wonderful quilting adventure by typing Japan into the search box on my blog’s homepage 😁.

Way back in April of 2020, with my trip to Japan fresh in my head and loads of time to quilt “at home”, I decided it was time to make a memory quilt of the trip, and started by piecing a background to display some of the pieces I made in the classes with our Japanese teachers. (Click here to read about the inspiration for this “background”).

You may have noticed I included my hand-stitched sashiko sampler in the piecing above. My next “what if” idea was to make the class samples into circles and “bounce” them over the surface of the quilt. These bird and flower samples are from the Yuzen painting class:

I loved the shibori dyeing class – and the color too!

I also included some other pieces I purchased on the trip, but I didn’t have enough circles to make a really interesting design. Then an idea struck – those circles on page 38! I only had a copy of that 1 page, and there were no “how-to” instructions, so how would I create those pieced circles??? As most of you know I’m always looking for an easy way to accomplish a task. After a bit of pondering I realized those circles could be cut from pinwheel blocks. After making pinwheels in different sizes from some of the Asian fabrics Evelyn gave me (thanks Evelyn!), I marked the circles, cut them out and added them to the collection.

It took awhile to find the right layout. I find it helpful when I’m doing this type of designing to take photos with my phone and then swipe between the options until I decide on the one that tickles my fancy. Here are three of the options I came up with:

And here’s the one I finally decided on:

I think it’s pretty, and such fun to snuggle under. I love being covered with all those wonderful memories!

All of the challenge quilts were fascinating and we finally have them posted to our Fiberistas site. To see all of the magazine pages and the quilts that resulted please click here! You’ll notice that most of us used only a small aspect of some portion of our page to inspire our quilts. I think that was part of the fun. Enjoy!

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