"One Red Square" Quilt Guild Challenge

I think I mentioned that our guild's challenge theme for this year is One Red Square.  Anything we enter must contain one red square.  Not two squares or more, just one red square.  I came up with LOTS of ideas for this challenge!  And I carried through on most of them!

There is a large white barn near where I live.  It is the only barn in the immediate vicinity.  And it is called (wait for it. . .) The White Barn.  Every time I drive past it I think, "That barn really needs a barn quilt on it."  So with this challenge, I was able to produce a barn quilt on my very own 

White Barn.  

I used a technique which I have used in the past called Fabric Confetti.  I took a class a few years ago at Asilomar (Empty Spools) from Denise Oyama Miller and Nancy Ryan.  Here's the process in a nutshell.  First I cut the fabric pieces into "confetti."  Fast back and forth with the rotary cutter accomplishes this.  The backing fabric and batting are laid down on a surface, and the colored confetti pieces are laid onto the batting to form the picture.  

When that is finished, a layer of black tulle is (very carefully) laid down on top, being careful not to move the fabric pieces.  Then it gets safety pinned really, really close together to baste it all and to hold the tiny pieces in place.

The next step is to stipple the * out of it, using invisible thread.  That holds everything in place.  Here you can see the quilt in the midst of being quilted down.

After I did that, I laid down the white fabric pieces for the barn itself.  In the photo below you can see that I've made some "barn board" lines in the barn, as well as tiny stippling.

When that was done, I had some fun laying down brown tree trunk pieces amidst the greenery.  I added a fence, which appears in that part of the scene.  I had the very edges of the quilt turned over and pinned for two reasons.  One is so I didn't "leak" any more pieces of fabric onto the floor!  There was already enough of that!  And the other reason is to minimize the risk of getting the edge of the quilt folded over underneath where I was quilting.  Yes, I did do that, and had to rip out some very dense quilting I had done over a tree trunk.

This is just a tiny sample of what the floor looked like, as well as the clothes I was wearing.  Little tiny fabric pieces everywhere!

Here's a close-up of part of the barn, where you can see the two slightly different colors I made the barn to give an impression of shadows.

I created some pink "Naked Ladies" and yellow dandelions and tall grasses in the foreground.  Naked Ladies are properly known as amaryllis belladonna.