Bollywood - Andrea Dodds

This is my Bollywood quilt.  

When this topic was first announced, I was excited about the possibilities and the color. I first wanted to do a hand with henna as I have recently developed an obsession with hands, but then I started looking at pictures online and as often happens started going to an internet rabbit hole, which landed me in the realm of different aspects of Indian culture, and more specifically Hinduism, the different gods, and Sanskrit. 

My next thought for this piece was to take the Sanskrit words for different yoga poses (as I have recently taken up yoga and am intrigued and challenged by it) and quilt those all over the background and appliqueing a single OM on the quilt...sadly, my quilting skills are not to that level yet and I feared that I was doing a disservice to the written word and plucked out what I had done. 

It was at this time that I reread what the challenge was to be. That the quilt should be a celebration of Bollywood and the Indian movie industry, so I had to go back to the proverbial drawing board. I had to think about what comes to mind when I think of Bollywood and I had to say that I think about the dancing that is done on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance". Next step....finding an image of dancing that I could use. I knew that I wanted to use this background fabric because it makes me think of the Holi Festival and I knew that I wanted it to be a silhouette. Originally, I had the silhouette dancer in the lower left corner and the echo quilted dancers going back behind, but when I went to add the final fabric dancer, I realized that my measurement was off and that if I placed her in the original spot, the quilt size would be outside of the proscribed measurements, so I had to move her to the lower right corner. I then realized that there was something missing, so I added the sun to the upper left corner. The funny thing is that the one thing that I really like about this quilt is the sun with the Sanskrit OM on it: 

What did I learn from creating this quilt (because part of my personal challenge in each of these challenges is to learn something new)? I learned to clarify the space on the fabric that you have to use so that your whole design will fit onto the finished product within the parameters that are set by the challenge and go with your gut and what makes you happy. With this being said, I believe I am going to remake this quilt going with my second idea and making something that makes me happy.