Is this cheating?

A couple of weeks ago I said I was going to make 39 little quilts for a quilt exchange in an Art Quilt group I belong to. I really tried to come up with an idea but, given that this is a REALLY talented group of quilters, nothing seemed "good enough" and I never got anything started. I have a lot of sketches though!

After many false starts, I finally got my act together on Sunday and am just about done with all 39 little quilts (4 inches square).

The leader of the group is my amazingly talented friend, Jane Davila. Jane and another amazingly talented friend, Elin Waterston, joined together to write two books, Art Quilt Workbook and Art Quilts at Play (they also have an instructional DVD, Art Quilting Basics). Both books & the DVD are wonderful tools for both new and experienced art quilters (more on the books later in the week).

When I was struggling with my little quilts, I decided to pick up Art Quilts at Play to see if it would give me a kick start. I had already done some painting on fabric and wanted to use that as part of my project. What I didn't have was a "motif" or theme for my project - that's the "other" side of my brain taking over, I always feel like my projects should "say something".

The section on carving your own rubber stamps caught my eye and I decided to dig out the carving tools and soft carving block. I drew a little sketch, darkened it with pencil, flipped it over onto the carving material, burnished it to transfer the pencil marks and carved away. I loved the result!

I don't want to show my project yet since we are due to exchange on Thursday. I'll show it on Friday though! In the end, I'm going to wind up with one of my little quilts and thirty-eight others from the group. I'm very excited to see what everyone else has done!

So, back to the subject line... I had to make this project anyway - is it cheating to use it for the double purpose of "Bookworm 52"??? I decided in the end that it is ok - and, realized that taking that approach might be even more useful to me than making a bunch of random projects. I'm always working on projects to submit to magazines and I haven't been able to get any of those done since I started my blog. Methinks that accomplishing both magazine submissions and blog projects will be a good thing to do when it is appropriate.

More later in the week....