It's never too late for some Pi (and my thoughts on Project Quilting)

Before presenting you the latest piece for the Project Quilting challenge, let me start by saying that I enjoyed these PQ challenges but I am also a little disappointed by the overall experience. If you want to know why you have to read below :)

So let's start with my entry for the last Challenge of Project Quilting

"Strings of Pi"

(inspired by the work of Martin Krzywinski)

size: 20'' x 20''

VOTE here: I am number 2 :)

(Project 6: 2016 Finish-Along, from the list in this post)

For this challenge we had to include one monkey wrench block and one flying geese block.
As usual I decided to make this challenge more personal and I decided to honor Pi as 3/14 was Pi day. I was planning to release it that day, but it took me longer than planned to make... oh well, it's never too late to celebrate Pi!! :)

So I built the entire piece as a monkey wrench in black with white accents, I wrote the first 220 digits of Pi on the white sections and I put a rainbow colored circle of geese in the center.
Inside of this circle is where the fun started!!! :)
I wrote the same 220 digits with thread lines connecting 10 sections (representing the digits from 0 to 9). So I started on the section for the 3 (underlined) and then I stitched an arch to go to the section of the 1, then a second arch to go to the section for the 4 and so on until I stitched all the written digits!
I used a fun Aurifil variegated 50 wt thread, and that creates a beautiful movement!
I will take better pictures of this piece when I have time, but for now this will have to do! :)

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And now some reflections...
These are just my personal thoughts, and I am sharing them with the hope of finding what you, my dearest reader, think about it! Sharing is very important to me and I really like to hear what others think!

So Project Quilting is a series of challenges that are meant to be inspirational and fun!  After they release the theme of the challenge, we have just a week to make a finished project (from inception to finishing). Every week that we enter a piece for the challenge we are entered into a hat to win one of the amazing prizes from sponsors.

In addition to the theme chosen by them, I decided to add an extra "theme" for myself: the piece should be inspired by a "traditional" art piece (painting, drawing, etc) AND I cannot buy new fabric for these projects.

After 6 challenges this is my collection!

Quilted art pieces inspired by the work of 

Kandinsky, Matisse, Ancient Egypt, 

Walt Disney, Dali and Krzywinski

Now... let me split my thoughts in Good and Sad :)

The Good:

• Having one single week and one specific theme may seem intimidating and stressful, but it's actually very liberating because it made me much more focused and I completed several projects, which is always a great boost for my creativity
• Sponsors and prizes are great! I won more than one random prize! So goodies are always a good incentive
• Having small projects and no particular rules to make them allowed me to try things I never tried before! And I fell in love with several of them (if you want links for tutorials on these techniques, just comment below... I saved them somewhere and I can find them for you)!
• facing instead of binding (for art pieces): done in my Dali inspired piece (looooove this)
• binding with same color as last border: done in Matisse inspired piece (don't like this look)
• binding by folding under: done on my Kandinsky inspired piece (this is ok, but it's cumbersome and not too clean)
• envelope turn: done on my Egyptian inspired piece (this is ok, but not my favorite)
• elmer's glue as basting glue: done on my Pi piece, just on the back (loooove this)
• use facing as hanging sleeve: done on my Dali inspired piece (looove this)
• regular hanging sleeve: done on my Matisse inspired piece (it's ok, now I know how to do it)
• squares pointing down and not on the corners (loooove this, as it takes 2 hand stitches and it accommodates rods longer or shorter than the actual piece)
• raw edge applique: done on several pieces (really like, because I can use any shape)
• thread painting: done on my Disney inspired piece (challenging but fun for small pieces)

The Sad:

• my pieces received consistently very very few votes... several times way less than pieces done by the hostesses and marked as "DO NOT VOTE FOR THIS" :) It's not that I think my pieces are wonderful, but in early challenges we had the chance to vote for six or seven projects... and some of them looked good but way less elaborate than mine... however I felt that people didn't really got my piece nor they were interested in reading their story... which brings me to the next point
• even if I was not expecting  to win viewer’s choice, I was expecting to make new connections with people! I was expecting people to comment and interact with me, read the story of the piece, the inspiration, etc. Instead I very very rarely got any comment... not even by the people hosting the event. While I understand that life is busy for everyone, I posted both on my blog, on their FlickR group and in their FB group... these platforms allow for very quick comments, so not receiving those, and not getting click though their own linky made me very sad.

Reflecting on the sad and the good, I can conclude that probably the community around this event is just not "my tribe". I think it's very important to realize that everybody have their own aesthetic and no one can like everything or please everyone. So the disappointing may just be of me trying to fit in a collective where I am not meant to fit... nothing bad here, just life!

Do I regret to have participated this year? Absolutely NOT!
Did I learned a lot from the experience? YES!!
Will I participate next year? I don't know... I will evaluate this next year!

Two quotes that summarize this experience:

1. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take (Wayne Gretzky)
2. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid (Albert Einstein)

Edited To Add: I received many comments on this post (THANKS) however many of them are from no-reply bloggers :( if I don't have a direct way to reply to your comment (your email) I will reply here on the blog, but you may not read it if you don't come back :( so if you want to make sure I interact with you, leave me a way to get in touch by writing your email address!! I appreciate everyone's comment!