Sewing With Nancy

Do you ever feel inspired by a challenge? Well, if so, you can take a quilting challenge online. Here to tell us about it is Kim Lapasak. Kim is with Project Quilting. Welcome to Sewing with Nancy, Kim. Thank you for having me. This your brainchild, Project Quilting online. Give our viewers a review of how that happened. Well, it was in 2010. I was hanging out with my husband and my brother and I had recently discovered Project Runway and I just loved it. I watched episode after episode and I wanted to learn how to sew clothing. Then I realized that I really don't have time for another project. But I do know how to quilt, so why not start Project Quilting. I gave my mother-in-law a call, Diane Lapasak and I asked her if she would do challenges if I would run it on my blog. She agreed, and that's how Project Quilting began. That's quite a few years ago. You would choose interesting topics for each week of a challenge. Yep, Diane actually does the brainstorming. I'd try to not to know much about the challenge beforehand. I get about a day notice so I can get the blog ready but I like to be as uninformed as the rest of the people I'm challenging so I don't have any advantage when I'm trying to make the quilt. These are not necessarily bed quilts. They can be small. Anything that is physically quilted. Quilted, or patchwork is one of our options. We've had people make skirts. Oh, sure. The big challenge with Project Quilting is you only have a week to do the challenge. A week is not very long, but yet, what great things. This challenge was entitled, tell our viewers. "My Favorite Color." Here's a cute table runner. So, you could pick one color and white that you could put together in a quilt. There could be different shades of that color. This one was done by my mother-in-law Diane. I did challenge her, because she's been doing the challenges for so many years but she never actually had a complete one herself. This was the first one she tried to fit in. Of course, she was at a conference all week. There was a ton of challenges in her life outside of the quilt. Here's a quilted piece. This is a pillow. I made this one. I didn't have a lot of time either that week so I knew I needed to keep it simple. That's one of the things, you look at your week and you decide, how much time to work on this piece. Now, we don't have lots of samples here because these entrants are online. They're online, so there is no boundary on who can participate. We've actually had participants from 38 different states four provinces, and seven other countries so this has gone worldwide. It's quite exciting. We would like to show a couple of other challenge topics. One is architecture. That was the first challenge in Season 3. It was one of my favorite challenges of all of Project Quilting. The pieces people came up with were just inspiring. Architecture has got so many different shapes and patterns in it that you could really do a lot of different things. You were inspired by this photo the bare bones of a barn. Yep, actually, the challenge came out and I thought in my head I'm like, oh, my goodness, there is a barn down the road that's getting taken down. Honey, watch the children, I have to go take a picture! I was so grateful I did that day, too because by the next day, the barn was down. So I really lucked out and got it. I did hear that the barn was moved somewhere else. Here's the image, your interpretation of that inspiration. Yes, and I really just tried to loosely look at the picture and use what I saw to create something. We'd like to show a fabric pack challenge. We have two examples. We were given a pack of fabric and we had to do the same quilt block in three different sizes so it was tradition times three. You can see how these quilts they're the same fabrics but they're completely different quilts. You mentioned you have a week. The challenge is a week long. The fabric pack one was more than a week though. But most of them are a week. Explain how the voting takes place and entrance. So, the challenges all go up Sunday at noon my time, which is Wisconsin time. Central time. You have until noon the next week to finish the challenge so you have seven days. I do like to do countdowns, so you're aware. It sort of helps, too, if you have some time zone issues I try to give hints like, how much longer that it's going on. Then we have a week break because everybody needs to breathe again and actually maybe do some dishes, the laundry. Isn't that fun? This is a fun thing, Kim, thank you for being with us. I'm inspired to maybe do that, who knows when. Yeah? I would love it. Come back and tell us more about it some time. Thank you so much. If you'd like to learn more about Project Quilting you can go to nancyzieman.com where you'll find all things Sewing with Nancy. Click on Nancy's Corner and you'll be able to find Project Quilting and find out how you can participate in Diane and Kim's great program. Well, this wraps up the three-part series on "Quick Column Quilts." I hope you enjoyed that and maybe will do that in a challenge. Thanks for joining me. Bye for now.