Quilts Challenge - Carnival

So, I finished the second challenge from Art Quilts Around the World. This time the challenge word was "Carnival". When I first thought about 'carnival', I thought of Carnival in Rio or Venice or even Mardi Gras. I had my first thought for a design and then decided that I needed to do a little more thinking. So, I did an image search for Carnival and found a number of different pictures of masks and parades that I thought I would try and use. Here are some of the examples:

I then started thinking about other types of carnivals and came onto traveling carnivals, carnies, and carnival games:

So, carnival games led me to think about the movie Big and the traveling carnival that the family went to at the beginning of the movie and thought that I would do a Zoltar quilt...but then thought about other freaks and geeks associated with carnivals:

But, then I ended up just going back to my original thought... A wilted feather in a puddle of oil at the end of the carnival parade....


Full Quilt with Mardi Gras bead sewn into the border.



Close up of the feather and the quilting

What I learned from this challenge is that I really want to work more on my quilting. I've done long arm quilting in the past on much larger pieces and that was so much easier than working on a smaller piece and controlling it all. The other thing I have learned is that I'm not a big fan of doing hand work. I had to hand sew the beads around the edge and I do not have the hand-eye coordination to thread a needle.