Quilt redemption….or The Case of The Boring Bamboo!

Back in 2011, we spent several weeks in China and I found a type of Bamboo that sparked my creative juices. I came home and turned the spark into a quilt top that ended up being REALLY boring…..

To read more about the making of this top, check out the blog post from 2011…..https://francesquilts.com/2011/08/16/congratulations-mrs-arnold-its-a-boring-quilt/

So for years and years (8 to be exact), it has been on my UFO To-Do list and I have managed to ignore it!! But, since I am trying to make myself do new and different things, I figured that it was time to tackle the “boring bamboo”.

The first thing that I did was pull out my rotary cutter and CUT IT INTO STRIPS!!! Yes, it was a bit scary, but it felt good to actually be doing something with it!! I added a few colored strips ……

…..and IMMEDIATELY liked it better!!

But, I didn’t want to stop there!! When I was at the Houston quilt show, I purchased a starter set of Tsukiniko Inks….

…..and a couple of stencils, including this bamboo design…..

I was intrigued with the pouncers that I bought and found that they worked beautifully for inking the stencil…..

Next, I got one of the “Fantastix” brushes and dipped the tip in a brighter color of ink…….

and used it to add some highlights to the bamboo leaves…..

Okay….that worked fairly well……

So now I was ready to do it on the real fabric that I wanted to use. I had learned two things during the test. First, I needed to mask the edges of the stencil so that I didn’t end up with “overflow”, and secondly, I needed to tape the stencil to the fabric so that it didn’t slip around as I “pounced”. I ended up taking care of both of these issues at one time by simply taping all around the edge of the stencil……

I was pleased with the final print and ready to move on to the next step….adding the old, ugly strips. It was like working a weird jigsaw puzzle…..

. I started adding strips and ended up with a hodge-podge mess…..

So I backed up, ignored all of the outside bits and pieced the inside part that I did like…..†

…..and then continued on with the next set of borders…..

….and then finished it up with a new outside border…..

Even though I didn’t use ALL of the parts of the original quilt, I am pleased with this “new” bamboo quilt top….much happier than with the original. Now I just need to think about how to quilt it and then get it FINISHED and out of my UFO box!!!