TIFC - April - In the company of giants!

Well, it is certainly a brave (or stupid!) novice crazy quilter who decides to do their very first CQ block as a TIFC challenge when taking part in TIFC are some of CQ's "giants" such as Pam, Allie, and of course, the TIFC queen, Sharon.



But who said I wasn't brave?



(or stupid)



This month the TIFC challenge topic is "change" and the color theme comes from a photo of an historical temple in Beijing. I decided that "China" and "change" fit well together for me and I don't need to push the design envelope any further than that. I therefore decided to go with the color scheme and to try something completely new for me - a CQ block made of Chinese silk.

So that was the easy part, working out what to do, the hard part was actually finding Chinese silk in the color scheme, which includes orange! Orange silk doesn't exist, I am convinced of it. I made a quick foray to the silk shop the other day (not the market, no time for that), and there was not one single inch of orange fabric in the shop. 没有! There was red of all varieties, even russet, but absolutely NO ORANGE! So the moral of that story is that apparently while the Chinese make roof tiles in orange (see inspiration photo), they do not weave silk in the color! Anyway, I decided to make a fairly neutral background and then bring the blue, green and orange from the photo in with ribbon and embroidery.

Anyway, with a bit of humming and hahhing, I chose some pretty neutral fabrics mostly in the dark brown, cream and russet colors in the photo, and I pieced the block, not really having any idea of what I was doing. I think I pieced a fundamental design flaw into it, which I am sure everyone reading this will notice, and I considered starting again, but then I decided that I have to be allowed to make some mistakes on my first CQ block, so the additional challenge became trying to cover up enough of the fundamental design flaw with embellishment that it was not quite so obvious. Hmm.....

The various embellishments are almost all from China - the two mah jong tiles are bone, made for bracelets, one is the "East Wind" and the other "Fa" - both lucky characters in Chinese mah jong. The brass button in the middle of the velvet flower is also Chinese, and the dragonfly (which is not made in China) is considered lucky in China. The large yellow flower is yellow jade,, as are the small yellow flowers on the top right hand side. The two red stone flowers on the top right corner are coral, also carved in China.

Well, there you have it, my very first CQ attempt - it was quite a challenge! Actually, I found it a bit daunting, I'd need to work out a better way to plan a block in future if I were to continue with CQ!