LEAP | DOT

When Jen Broemel @jen.broemel and Robert Bosscher @rjbosscher announced their @open_____jar collaboration on January 1, I was intrigued. A 'no rules' place for creatives to play and experiment, I decided to at least follow along. Then a prompt for January was announced - LEAP. "We encourage you to interpret what this means for you and entice you to express this interpretation HOWEVER YOU WANT! JUST FOR THE SAKE OF DOING IT! ... It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to work out, it just is." Oh I loved the sound of that. I already had a project list a mile long, but I added 'LEAP' to it just the same. Just in case.

Over half way through the month, I finally took time to respond.  I grabbed a scrap of inspiration fabric  that I'd picked off of the free table at our guild holiday party last month.

I also rummaged through my scraps to find pinks that would coordinate. Then I went back to the Open Jar post to remind myself what else Jen and Robert had said about the prompt. 

"We encourage you to interpret what this means for you and entice you to express this interpretation HOWEVER YOU WANT! JUST FOR THE SAKE OF DOING IT! What a beautiful thing, right? It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to work out, it just is. . . and it will benefit you, we promise. We challenge you to open the jar and take a LEAP!"

And so I did, and these 'blocks' were the beginning. I wasn't sure where they were headed, but they were inspired by a quilt I'd seen with pieced columns. I left them on the design wall overnight, liking very much what I had so far.

But in the morning, when I was ready to continue on, I decided to change course, and cut all the wide enough slabs into 6" x 7" blocks. Where needed, I pieced slabs together, or added more fabric, until I had 16 blocks.

I took another pause, and that led to me adding space between some of the blocks.

And from there, I began to fill things in. Where I'd begun with a dot fabric (unknown) by tildasworld, a stripe by Just Wing It! by MoMo for moda, and various pink solids, I used Kona Ash to help fill in and around. It took me a couple of sewing sessions, but eventually had a quilt top I was happy with.

And then of course, I whipped up a pieced quilt back, begun with solid scraps leftover from the front. The dotty fabric that brought it up to size was Now We're Goin' Places by Monica Lee for Timeless Treasures.

I chose two Aurifil 50wt threads for quilting - 2600 [Dove] and 2423 [Baby Pink].

An uneven grid seemed to fit for the quilting, and where I normally do minimal marking before quilting, with this one, I marked every single line with my trusty hera marker. Bound in Kona Ash, this little quilt, which I named "Dot," finished at 25.5" x 29".

This project gave me inordinate amount of pleasure, so I'm really glad I took the leap, so to speak. AND in keeping with the commitment I recently made to take more photos of me with my quilts, I had hubby do just that.