Group creative projects are typically met with trepidation. We've all seen the collaborative projects on Project Runway; they occasionally succeed, but more often than not personalities clash and there are conflicting style issues. I have to admit that this is the first project that I've worked on as a group that went swimmingly well from start to finish, and I wanted to share the details.
Our guild is only a few years old and we didn't have a banner. One of our members, Jess, spearheaded the effort to form a subcommittee of people who were excited about making this happen. The group consisted of Jess, Mary, Kali, Sarah, Stephanie and me. We wanted to stick with the original logo design of a wave. After an initial pre-guild breakfast meeting, most of the planning was done over email, including font selection. Our homework was to each make a handful of 12 x 12" slabs of fabric out of scraps. Then we met one cookie-powered Sunday afternoon and made it happen.
Jess and Mary took the slabs and sliced curves into them to add to the wave effect but also to mix up the scraps so they'd work together well (a k a flow - heh). We built the wave up so that it would fit over the paper-drawn template, fused a large part of the blue to Pellon® 805 Wonder-Under and used the template to carefully cut out the wave. The wave was then fused to the background fabric and we went to work on the letters. As the letters go through the wave, we wanted the color to change so we sliced the S and the O in half to help the transition. We borrowed the MQG font directly from the official web site and did a double appliqué (blue over off-white) so that the blues would stand out.
I took it home to do the appliqué; I did the wave first and then all the letters.
I've handed it off to Mary who quilts like the wind. Wait until you see the amazing job she did on our QuiltCon challenge quilt; there are cats in the quilting. CATS! I'm most curious to see how this banner will turn out, but after the entire experience with these lovely ladies and knowing how Mary quilts, I have no worries whatsoever.
