You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist

One of my favorite quotes from Indira Ghandi is what I immediately thought of when two of my favorite quilting podcasters , sandy of quilting for the rest of us and sandi of quilt cabana - organized a quilt challenge after the Boston bombing based on the word hope. When events touch us, what do quilters do - make a quilt. It makes us feel better somehow.

 

23" x 13"

This is my zentangles quilt - I'll show you how I went about it.

 

I found a public domain image on the Internet and traced the handshake onto plain muslin with pencil. Also printed out the words the size I wanted and traced that as well.

 

Then after adding a white border I backed and batted with thin cotton batting and outlined the handshake, sewed over the words and randomly added lines to divide up the space into separate little "doodle canvases".

I then took a photo of this blank canvas.

Printed out the photo and used that to audition a bunch of doodles, drawing on the paper print out. Some work, some don't and I would rather see the ones that do not work on paper before quilting them. I use a lot of Leah Days free motion quilting designs. She is very generous by putting hundreds of FMQ designs here.

Then it's just a matter of putting the pedal to the metal - getting into the "zen" of quilting.

Before you know it, you have a zentangles quilt!

If more people in this world would just talk and get to know one another instead of crazy yelling and fist clenching we would all be better off. As John Lennon said

"Imagine all the people, living life in peace"

 

I'm linking this post to the quilters blog festival.

You should also check out the project hope online quilt show on Flickr.

I will add my quilt to it soon but there are some really good ones.