Scrap Challenge Unicorn Dust

My smart mouth says things sometimes when I'm not paying attention. Stitched In Color and Intrepid Threads had a scrap challenge. You just had to say what you might make and you might win the fabric. Here is the post about the winners and what we said in order to win. Yep, something about unicorn dust and big and small, etc.

It may be a bit hard to see but there's a scrappy/mummy heart, the one with an appliqued blue circle. Above that are machine and hand quilted unicorn horns pointing towards the heart. The little blocks coming from the heart are unicorn dust! As every one knows, unicorn dust is love. The bottom right corner shows the baby blue backing I used. The orange square block has one side of the blue melons hand pieced to the white and the other side appliqued to the grey and pink flower.

I would always wonder how people could piece such tiny things (have you seen some of the Tokyo Quilt show things?) and I think I understand now. I've gotten a ticket to ride on the batty bitty piecing train. The littlest unicorn Anna Maria Horner Field Study dust speck is less than a half of an inch big. Really it's so ridiculous, what was I thinking! The key is to make blocks and then trim them down to square them up. The green square, below top right, has tiny piecing in it. All of the blue corners around the pink/gray flower are pieced in. The middle picture below is a shot of the sparse machine quilting I did. I wanted to keep the quilt loose and fluffy. Now for the secret messages part...

I'm about to go to church on ya so if you don't wanna know you can skip to the end with the scraps picture :) . The blue circles enclosed in squares represent (pulling out the art history and symbolism here) us here on earth striving to get closer to the heavens. We are the square and the perfect circle is heaven, or where God is. In between the circle in squares are three green squares. The number three has great symbolism. In Christianity it is associated with the Holy Trinity, the three days it took for Christ to be resurrected and many other things. There are four vertical stripes, two blue and two light orange. If you see they are wavy in the middle. In art and religious architecture you can often see depictions of four rivers. Originally the reference came from Genesis where the scripture refers to four rivers flowing out of Eden. Over the millennia the rivers came to represent the living water, which is Christ or the gospel, or the four corners of the earth. I fussy cut the fabrics so that there would be a wave of water going through them. 

Even the unicorn was seen as a symbol of Christ, especially in the medieval ages. A passage of the Bible was incorrectly translated from Hebrew to the Greek to... you get the picture. The word used in Hebrew was apparently a type of ox but it was extinct by the time the translators came around and it gradually was translated as great horned beast or unicorn.

So there are the cleansing and protective unicorn horns-or Christ, pouring love into the heart where it is then spread over the world in tangible form. Which could be our love for our fellow man, families or service. Service is sparkly and colorful right? Coming from the love of Christ are the four rivers of living water or the gospel. Which gets shared with us and we then work at being better people, more like the divine or our circle squares. There's more symbolism but I figure that's enough for one day. If Christianity's not your thing you can think of it as the delightful, or creative, that is in our hearts that gets spread through good will, kindness and unicorn dust to help people be more happy. Happy's good.

Why's it a mummy heart? There's a few reasons but seein' as how we've already had a lesson today I'll just say that I think Halloween should be involved with almost everything. So mummy heart it is! Those are the remnants and bits and pieces that were all over the place carefully placed and cared for. Like I helpfully put the thread on my black pants to save for later. Clever, that's me.

Above are some of the sketches I did and the trimming of the HST's. On the right pic gross brown stuff came out of the iron.  I was scared but took the HST's over to the sink and rinsed them off like I would a dirty dish and they came clean right away, yay!

Now that I look at the pics of the quilt I think it needs more. There's probably more applique in the future. Might as well make it tiny too. I find it interesting that I would probably never have bought all these fabrics to put together but I really like how it turned out. I think the colors are pretty and cheerful without being too sweet. That's what's so nice about everyones' choices and tastes, it makes for variety and spice.

Thanks for stopping by and why don't you go back here to Stitched in Color to check out the others. There's a pillow, a wall hanging and a car book caddy. And I'm linking up to Let's Get Acquainted Monday, Cheers!


P.S. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this quilt until my tiny niece came over and when she saw it she immediately wanted to be wrapped up in it, make a standing fort to go around her, crumple it up and spin in circles with it, lay it over her dolly, hide under it and finally throw it down several times on the floor until it was just right and then lie on it. I guess it's decided it needs to be hers.