February 2016 Art Quilt Challenge

I've been toying with several ideas for the art quilt challenge project for this month, and I went on a business trip, and then on a mini-vacation, and came back and realized it was the end of the month and I hadn't done anything. So, here is the quickie, no pattern February art quilt:

Okay, so it isn't actually a quilt, it's a quilt creature inspired by the sock monsters in John Murphy's Stupid Sock Creatures.

I used a string-pieced block with poofy polyester batting, and buttons for eyes.

I cut the limbs out of red scraps, added batting, and sewed them together. Luckily the Megasaurus came back from the shop this month (it needed some gear grease and cleaning), because it sewed through all the layers just fine when the Featherweight was being cranky and either sewing tiny stitches or skipping them. This machine is a tank.

There were a couple of extra limbs left over at the end, but that's okay.

I went to the AQS Quiltweek in Daytona Beach on my mini-vacation. Amazing quilts, I should probably go to shows like that more often in order to improve the ambition of my quilting projects. It was about the same size as the Jacksonville show, although the average difficulty level of the the quilts was higher. The day after we went to the show, we drove to the Kennedy Space Center. They've changed the exhibits around quite a bit since we were last there. The Shuttle Program ended, and they retired the Atlantis to the Space Center. I was surprised to look at the shuttle and see quilting!

Much of the sides and top of the shuttle are covered in a patchwork of quilted thermal blankets made of silica-fiber. That's right, they quilted the space shuttle!