The Lion King Cherrywood Challenge 2016

7/8/16 update

Challenge Finalists were announced today and Giraffic Park made the cut!
Which means I needed to send it to Cherrywood in Minnesota where it will be professionaly
photographed and included in the commemorative book for the challenge.  Then it will go through a second round to determine if it will be included in the traveling exhibit.

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In 2014 Cherrywood Hand-Dyed Fabrics sponsored a quilting challenge based on the Broadway musical Wicked.  The resulting exhibit was absolutely stunning.  I was able to see it in person at The Road To California quilt show in 2015 and I was blown away with the artistry, creativity and skill displayed in those quilts.



So when Cherrywood announced a new challenge for this year, I jumped at the chance to participate!

I bought my challenge fabric bundle (consisting of three lovely gold/yellow fat quarters and one black fat quarter) the first day they became available in January.  The challenge was to use the fabrics in the challenge bundle to create a 20" x 20" quilt inspired by Disney's The Lion King the Musical.  Participants could use additional Cherrywood fabrics as long as the challenge fabrics made up at least 60% of the quilt.  Deadline for submissions was July 1, 2016.  120 finalists would then be chosen to become part of a special exhibit which will travel to major quilt shows around the country.

Though I have seen the annimated The Lion King movie, I have not yet been fortunate enough to see the live musical, so I spent some time searching the internet for photos to give me some ideas.  The images that captured my imagination and inspired me the most all included a beautiful golden sun on a gorgeous orange/red background as the stage backdrop. I decided almost immediately that sun was going to be a focal point in my design.  It took me quite a while to weed through all the other ideas crowding my head.  Several months in fact.  It was early May before I felt ready to actually start cutting and sewing fabric.

The first thing I did was to use an improvisational curved piecing technique to create my sun.

Then I got stuck again trying to figure out how to use the rich golds of the challenge fabrics to make the background for my sun when what I really wanted to do was recreate the luscious oranges and reds of the images in my head.  Weeks passed before I decided to go ahead and do just that.  I pulled the colors I wanted from my precious stash of Cherrywood fabric and used the same piecing technique I had used on the sun to create my background.  YES!  Now I was getting somewhere.




From here my plan was to applique on "the tree of life" and quilt some animals into the tree trunk and perhaps some symbols into the background.  But now I had a dilema.  Even using the black challenge fabric for the tree, I didn't think I was going to meet the 60% challenge fabric requirement.

I already intended to add a strip of one of the darker golds to the bottom to give myself something to ground the tree, but that still might not be enough.  So I figured I would have to add a border of some kind.  I toyed with the idea of making a border that might suggest a lion's mane and went so far as to piece together some scrap fabric to see how that would look.





I was satisfied I could get the lion mane look I wanted but I wasn't sure I liked the combination of the test border with my background. And I was not happy with the idea of putting a "box" around my lovely sun and background.

I started laying fabric around the background piece hoping inspiration would strike.  And it did!  I could make the border asymetrical and just put it on two sides.  And I could curve that border so it would look more graceful, and I could add a pieced or appliqued element between the border and the background.  Oh, the ideas were coming fast and furious now!  I sketched out a few of those ideas and finally settled on this one.   

New stumbling block.  I had a vague idea of how to make the curved flying geese strip, but I had never actually done it before and I was getting dangerously close now to the submission deadline.  Only a few days left.  I was too excited by the idea to give up on it.  I found a short YouTube video by Gail Garber showing how to draft the free form flying geese foundation and I made a small test strip with more scrap fabric.  That seemed to work out just fine so I moved on to the real thing.


Success.  But at what cost?  The whole process of researching, testing and sewing took up an entire day.  I had only about 48 hours left until the submission deadline.

The next day was a bit stressful for me as I worked non-stop to complete the quilt top and get it ready for quilting. Normally I would hand stitch my applique but the clock was ticking so I used turned edge machine applique to attach the sun and the flying geese.  I traced some generic giraffe images to make templates for cutting my giraffe silhouettes out of the black challenge fabric that was already backed with Misty Fuse fusible webbing.  I drew my tree trunk on freezer paper which was then ironed on to the front of the black fabric and I cut that out.  The cloud-like tree tops were cut freehand from that same black fabric.  And finally all of those pieces were ironed onto the quilt top.  Whew! By the end of the day I had managed to finish the quilt top, get it sandwiched with the backing and batting and had even done the outline quilting around the applique elements.

A few hours of sleep and I was back in the sewing room and on to the quilting.  I wanted to do something really elaborate in the border area but time considerations meant I had to go with what I was already comfortable doing.  So taking my friend Sue M.'s suggestion I put feathers and pebbles in that area.  Soon it was all quilted except for the sun.  Back when I was considering the lion mane border, I had also considered quilting a lion's head into the sun and extending those quilting lines out to meet the mane in the border.  Even though I had nixed the lion mane border idea, I still liked the lion in the sun quilting concept.  But now my tree and giraffes were in the way.  They would obscure a large part of the face.  Thankfully inspiration struck again.  I could just offset the face to the edge of the sun and then most of the features would still be visible.  For a person who truly appreciates asymetry, it sure takes me a long time to think about using it in my own designs!

Finally the quilting was done and a few hours still remained to sew on the facing, take photographs and complete the submission process.  Just one more important decision to make.  This quilt needed a name.  Before I could even ask for suggestions, my husband Tom blurts out, "You should call this Giraffic Park."  Perfect!

I spent those last few hours frantically applying the facing and fussing with every Ott Light in the house trying to get proper lighting to take photographs that would show off all the important elements of the quilt.

Finally, with only 40 minutes left before registration would close, I completed my submission.  Talk about cutting it close!!!  It was a crazy few days there towards the end and I must thank my friend Sheryl Z. for keeping me sane by letting me bounce ideas off of her at all hours. But now that it''s all said and done, I couldn't be happier with the result.

Giraffic Park

A few days after registration closed, Cherrywood announced they received a total of 304 entries!  I am so excited to see what everyone else has come up with.  After seeing the Wicked Challenge, I know there will be some exceptional work done by the finalists in this challenge too.  I will be so thrilled if I am chosen to be among them.  But for now, I am contenting myself with the satisfaction of a job well done.