First, what you’ve all been waiting for: My 2026 Challenge Quilt in situ. You’ve seen the halfway point, you’ve seen the sleeve, now you see the whole thing! They’re arranged by postal code, so I’m surrounded by Freisingers.
Mine was the only one with cheeseburgers.
The five “challenge fabrics” were displayed on each wall as well.
If you’re unfamiliar with a “challenge quilt”, it’s pretty simple: everyone gets a packet containing the same fabrics and some threads, and must incorporate them into a quilt of a specific size that fits a certain theme. The theme this year was “Zwischentöne“, a word which can mean “implied speech” but also is used when working with a color wheel or musical compositions (there were a lot of music-themed pieces).
Here’s a snapshot from before I mailed it off:
There’s some left!
The speech bubble says, “Wir hatten lange Zeit keine Cheeseburgers mehr“, which is a passive-aggressive way of saying “I want cheeseburgers for supper.” The white-glove ladies laughed. All credit to Mr Radish for the help with the grammar; it was definitely above my certification.
General consensus was the checked fabric was “fies” (mean) but the one I hated was the linen-look embroidery fabric. Absolutely not my thing at all. When the quilt is done traveling, I might put another burger over it.
Anyway, we spent the day there–had a beer and some pizza. I don’t have too many photos to share, they were mostly for stealing ideas, but here’s a few things you might like.
The Swiss group patCHquilt (CH is the abbreviation for Switzerland) had an exhibit called Round Bobbins, which were strings of 35 themed four-inch textile artworks attached to five-inch wooden spools and hung from the ceiling. The hostess explained there were over ten-thousand individual artworks from eighteen countries being shown. They derive their power from the aggregation (obviously).
There is a better picture of it displayed in Suhl on their website.
And this exhibition was accompanied by two men playing the didgeridoo.
