Challenge completed (almost)

Get yourself a cup of coffee 'cos this is a long one.
Back on July 21st I showed a piece of fabric that I made for the Artist Muse challenge and said that I would also use it for a challenge at the Embroiderers Guild with the Machine Embroidery group.
Here are the pieces that I received(inc. mine) and the challenge was to make something from them.
We were allowed to add 2 other fabrics to complete the task.

I decided to use black as one fabric because nothing else seemed to be able to blend them all together.

I joined them together with black strips--

Then I added more strips of black between the 3 strips I had made---

I then cut the piece into 4 sections vertically---

Re-arranged them---

Joined them together again---

But I had 2 pieces that I hadn't included it the strip piecing because they didn't seem to want to go anywhere.

I had thought of putting them in the backing piece of fabric but that wouldn't have been very nice to the people who had contributed them.

I discovered in my "stash of stuff" a roll of quarter inch black bias tape that I had used when I made a stained glass wall quilt --so I used that to add the "odd" fabrics to my little quilts.

Here are the "almost" finished quilts-I say almost because I only have to do the hand stitching around the binding--and I will leave that until my thumb gets better.

I have made them so that the stitching goes horizontal on one and vertical on the other.
Both quilts has a piece of all of the 11 fabrics in them.

They measure approx. 34cm square.
The fabric I used for the binding is one that I had hand dyed about 7 years ago and the muted colours seemed to combine well with all the other colours.

Ah-hah I just had a thought-- that the binding fabric could well fit into the challenge that Carol set us on the 3rd of July-- to use something we had in our "stash" for a long time.

This is a close up of the stitching and how I added the "odd" fabrics

Another challenge to mark off the list.