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This project was a Starry Eyes challenge. The Chinese Whispers game is similar to the children’s game of telephone tag, in which the first player creates a story or message and whispers it to the next person in line. The second person repeats the message to the third person, and so on until the last person. The last person then shares what she/he heard, which is often quite different from the original message. The concept was applied to a quilt challenge, in which the first quilter to participate creates an art quilt. That quilt was then given to the second person who used the original quilt as inspiration. The second quilt was passed to the third person, who only saw the second quilt, and so on. Each person only saw the previous quilt. At the conclusion of the challenge, the quilts were displayed as a group, and members explained what gave them the inspiration for their quilt. There were no rules to creating the quilts, for example size, techniques used, color, etc. It was fascinating to see the progression of themes throughout the group of quilts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers for an interesting article about ‘Chinese Whispers’.
Kelly Zuber organized a 40th Anniversary Challenge quilt project to commemorate this milestone for the guild. Participants chose a year to represent. There were 2 rules: the year had to be displayed in 3 inch numbers, and the combined perimeter measurement of the quilt could not exceed 81 inches (symbolizing the year the guild was founded – 1981.) Most of the photos in this post were taken by Kelly Zuber.
Please note: as of this date, the years 1992 and 2006 were still available for making a challenge quilt; quilts for the years 2002, 2003, 2008 and 2010 had not been turned in.
Click on an image to begin the slideshow.