"That's just ugly!"

Have you clicked on the Brown Bag Quilt Contest button yet?  So exciting!  Here's the deal:  We exchange 2 yards (in whatever denomination -- quarters, halves, full yards or what not) with a designated person and then have to use 90% of the fabric we've been sent, along with whatever we want to add from our stash, to make a quilt.  Fun, huh?  I can't wait to see the fabric I'm getting! I hope I am creative enough to come up with a cool design.



Drew my own block out of the bag.
Am I as RED as my sweater with
embarrassment!? Um, yeah.

Curious, though, that the contest used to be called the "Ugly Quilt Contest." :-D



Apparently, the object of the exchange is to get rid of fabric that no longer speaks to you.  (The assumption is that the fabric SCREAMED your name once upon a time, and now it makes YOU scream! LOL)

 

Are we having fun yet!?! LOL

Well, I'm not worried.  No matter what I receive from my assigned partner, it can't be as bad as what I'm working on from my own collection of quilt tops!

One Christmas our club decided to bring friendship star blocks in Christmas colors for a drawing for a lucky quilter to win.  We didn't designate WHICH colors, just Christmas ones. OH. MY. WORD.  Did we get a bunch of interesting blocks!  AND  I -- moi, me, myself -- won the accursed lovely :-P things.



Did you ever see anything so...yeah.

 So I've put them together. And they are not pretty as a group.  I think this might actually turn out to be -- yes, you must agree! -- an UGLY quilt.



Did you know that "ugly" is not used at all, not once!, in the King James Version of the Bible?  Isn't that a hoot!? You know there had to be something ugly back there in Biblical times! 

The New International Version, yeah.  They got Ugly.  It's kinda hilarious:

Joseph (the coat of many colors guy) is listening, in Genesis 41, to Pharaoh tell his dream (of the impending famine, as it turns out).

Pharaoh says, "In my dream I was standing on the bank of the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, fat and sleek, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows came up -- scrawny and very ugly and lean.  I had never seen such ugly cows in all the land of Egypt."  (v. 17-19 -- emphasis mine! :-D)

What do I learn from this?  Ugly is for real.  I think it's this quilt! LOL  Check out one of the friendship star blocks! I hadn't the heart to fix it.  "It is," as my friend Pat from upstate New York (not the block maker) says, "what it is."   Perhaps the maker didn't want anymore friends. :-D 

Secondly, skinny cows are ugly.  It's proof from the Bible that you don't have to be skinny to be beautiful.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

The good news is that I'll use my Christmas Quilt to practice my machine quilting with my Hobby Quilter.  I'm an optimist.  Perhaps quilting will make the quilt.  Perhaps I'll learn to love the thing. 

Perhaps it will make some cow a lovely gift!

Blessings,