Faith Personal Progress Project, with Remnants

Right now I’m working on several projects at once, as is usual for me. I know it would be better to do one thing at a time and finish it and clean up afterwards before starting on a new project, but I’ve never been all that linear as far as progressing through a project. I tend to catch a wave of enthusiasm and roll with it. Hopefully the project doesn’t end up in the UFO pile, but sometimes it does.

I’m working on a couple of tops and dresses for girls, plus the Baby Brit quilt-along, and a quilted travel pillow I’m doing for a Craftsy Class, Scrap Quilting.

I just finished this little art quilt wall hanging.

“Faith” art quilt

I used a bunch of remnants, naturally. I found a little piece of fusible quilt batting in the bin at Joann’s, that was just about the size of the wall hanging I wanted to make.

Then, the inspiration started to nag at me little by little. In the church I attend, we have a Personal Progress program for the young women to do, which involves lots of scripture study and service projects, for the purpose of developing a testimony and whatever talents one may possess, and doing good works. The first of the 8 virtues in the program is faith. I felt that I wanted to do a project for that virtue that included my newest hobby, scrap quilting with remnant fabrics.

An art quilt is a small project, not too overwhelming. It has a message, not too complicated. And I found that I had fabric and ideas that really could mesh together for my desired design. I used a lot of white cotton fabric with white stars: the color of the virtue of faith is white. I wanted to use a tree for a motif, because some of the verses of scripture that I wanted to refer to, speak of faith as if it were a seed, to be given a chance to grow in your heart. If it does grow successfully in your heart, wouldn’t you want it to be a tall, strong, beautiful tree? A redwood tree, the tallest and strongest rock of a tree! And I picture it growing out of a heart of stone, with a living, beating heart within. As in Ezekiel 36-26,
“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” The prairie points edging triangles were leftover from a prior project. The brown and gray patches of fabric were remnants. The green patches were from a bag of remnants that my mom had in her fabric stash. I used embroidery software to create the center statement, the scripture from Hebrews 11:1, and the other words from various scriptures, embroidered on gray stabilized fabric. I cut out the wordstrips and appliqued them on the quilt top along with the other patches of fabric, having glued them down with 505 Spray and Fix first. I stitched around the borders with one of the machine’s programmed stitches and Snow White Robison-Anton rayon thread.

Since the last post I made, Louise at Slave to My Needles blog nominated me for the One Lovely Blog award. Thank you for the wonderful encouragement and compliments! I love to read your blog and I’ve enjoyed checking out the several blogs you introduced me to in that post. I do want to comply with the requirements for nominating others and telling things about myself but I would like to do that a bit at a time if it’s all right. I love the time I spend in the virtual world looking at all the marvelous projects and posts, but sometimes it takes away from the real world of accomplishment, so I have to do some balancing!