Essential!

 .....ESSENTIAL.

As I was contemplating Victoria's word challenge, the word "essential" really appealed to me on a couple of different levels.  First off, it's so important (though sometimes quite difficult!) to focus on what is necessary, vital to life and personal growth - creatively and otherwise.  This project reminds me that sometimes simply creating is essential.  When I am so easily distracted by lots of ideas, demands and "shoulds", I want to heed the call of the essential in my life.

The other concept of essential is "reflecting the essence".  Whether cleaning the house, meeting an important deadline or just playing, I want all the things I do to reflect my essence.

It's great that part of the instructions were to complete this project QUICKLY!  Like I said, I had thought about my word, but when I was sewing with Mom and Gran over the holidays, I just grabbed some scraps from the projects we were working on and started PLAYING.  Before they knew it, I had some red made-fabric for the "e" and had played with some sewing machine stitches in a heavy cotton thread for the remaining letters.  The background city fabric came from a quilt Gran was working on for my niece.

This was a fun project because none of the fabric was mine - since we were at Gran's house, I was picking through her scraps :)  I even rummaged through my her craft drawers and found the world's tiniest black pompom for the dot on the i.

So fun to quilt such a small piece - it's about 11" x 22"......I used bright metallic turquoise thread for the busy city print. I love the little bit of sparkle it adds.  I also added some black pearl cotton chainstitch around the "e" to make it stand out even more and pieced the binding for some extra fun.
Thanks for the challenge, V!

posted for Kim H