Making a Beautiful Swan

Back in December, my quilt guild did this really crazy fabric swap where everyone brought a half yard of what they considered a really ugly fabric, something that got into their stash who knows how.

We all have those "what was I thinking" pieces of cloth.

Everyone stood around in a circle, tore a strip of fabric off their piece and then passed that to the next person in line. And so on and so on until everyone had a little bit of everyone else's really ugly fabric.

OK, now you've got a lot of design challenges out there among folks who love design challenges.

So for the past few months, during show and tell, these phenomenal quilts made of "ugly" fabric have waltzed into our lives.

Now there's another truism in quilting that no matter what kind of fabric you have, if you cut it small enough, you turn it into something interesting. Not only that, you can sew anything to anything else and it works if the pieces are small enough.

Last night, one of my guild members brought this little sweetie to me as a donation for the Parkinson's Quilt Project. It was made—of ugly fabrics—by Ruth Ann Wheeler. It's done in a slight variation of a Log Cabin with a larger center/starter square (4 inches) with all the rest of the logs cut at 2 1/2 inches.

Lovely, isn't it? A beautiful swan indeed.