Challenge Stress

The title above can be understood in two ways. Remember the Challenge I blogged about last week that I wanted to enter? Well, it's STRESSING ME OUT! I think I know now why I never bothered to enter challenges in the past.

The more I worked on the little quilt that I'm doing for this Garden Challenge, the more I hated it. So before I used up all my painted tea bags, I stopped. I really didn't like the background I had done with the acrylic paint. It was too bold and when I applied the painted tea bags to it, you couldn't tell they were there.

So yesterday, I had decided to drop the challenge.....the easy way to eliminate stress. Besides, I have a million and one other projects in my head that I want to do. Why should I spend time on something I really didn't like to do anyway?

But.....this morning when I went into my studio where my painted tea bags were still sitting on my table, they continued calling to me to try to complete the challenge. I have to admit, my first attempt did teach me something about the medium I was using and that was that I cannot put the darker painted tea bags on first. Because the tea bags are transparent you see the dark right through so when I was trying to put a red flower over the blue sky it wasn't reading as a flower. Along that same line of thought, I also learned I could layer the tea bags to get darker shades.

With my new plan and the things I learned, I began again. Which brings me to the second understanding of the title of this blog. Challenge Stress. Stress can be a challenge in itself to overcome and with my new plan and the headway I'm making on the project, I think I've got it on the run. The stress is leaving, however, I still have a deadline to contend with and I'm all out of tea bags! I'll be drinking a lot of tea today in order to finish the project in time to submit it.

I started with a plain cream-coloured cotton as the background and fused the painted tea bags directly on it. I like the delicate look of the tulips which comes from the transparency of the tea bags.

I still have to put more leaves and greenery on the bottom, then sandwich it and quilt it before the January 24th deadline. I'm much happier with it. Now for a cup of tea.