To kick off year six of Quilts Unscripted Bee, Emily asked us for 6" x 12" blocks inspired by rays of sunshine and colors reminiscent of a spring bouquet - pink, orange, yellow, with small amounts of lime or sky blue in medium and light colors.
This was such a happy palette to work with. She invited us to work in some improv piecing within our rays. I had really enjoyed piecing improv wedges for the start of my round robin quilt and the center of one of these previous bee blocks, so I set off to make improv wedges with in deep pink and orange.
That wedge unit went into this block.
One of my favorite feature elements is the 1/8" finished pieced strip, so I decided to work one into my second block, coupled with wedges going two different directions.
Here's the full view of my two 6" x 12" blocks. This is going to be such a happy quilt. I look forward to seeing it all put together. Have fun, Emily!
The San Mateo County Fair (June 5-14 this year) has a large quilt display within the Home Arts Maker Department division in the exhibition hall. I've enjoyed going to the fair in past years to walk through the entire exhibition hall. This year I'll have five quilts on display at the fair. This is one of them. Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild (which I joined last Fall) has two challenge categories at the fair under the Quilt Challenge Groups division. The Let's Meet Our Panel challenge asked us to use a panel. I've had students use improv work from class to create a quilt featuring a panel (like the one by Carol O. in this post) and have wanted to make one myself for some time. Since I didn't have a panel on hand, Rochelle from my guild shared this Monsters Inc. panel with me.
I started out by choosing solids from the five main characters on the panel. I did pretty well finding the coordinating colors in my solids drawer. On the left: Free Spirit Berry, unidentified light blue, unidentified olive green. On the top: Kona Jamaica, Kona Violet, Kona Cactus. On the right: Kona Oasis, Kona Peony, Kona Denim. On the bottom: unidentified pale blue, Kona Tomato, Kona Corsage.
Initially I thought I'd have each side be the colors of one of the characters, but there are five monsters (initially the Yeti blended in to the background to me) so I decided to mix up the colors to create the palettes for each side. For each side I chose a general geometric idea or starting point and started cutting fabric. With most of my improv work I don't know exactly how things will end up. This was no exception. Once I created the strip set and cross cut into pieces for the bottom side, I auditioned to decide if I wanted to insert strips of Corsage or not.
As I finished the improv sections, I added them to my design wall. As I tell students in class, I don't care about the messy edges until those edges are going to be sewn to something else. So you can see on my design wall that while the piecing is done, I haven't yet trimmed the borders to size. I'd been thinking about improv sections that would finish approximately 5" wide and I work oversized so I can trim down to my desired finished size.
From the beginning I figured I would miter the corners on my border. I creased the panel on the diagonal so I could use that as my guide. I figured I would just puzzle it out, but didn't have time to be wrong and need to redo things, so I found this tutorial to watch about the process of mitering corners. Thankfully the process went pretty smoothly. I trimmed both edges of the top border before attaching it, but then decided to trim only the inner edge of the other sides and wait until after quilting to trim the whole quilt to size.
Two down, two to go...
Using the diagonal creases through the center panel as my guide I did walking foot quilting in a 2" grid on the diagonal. My first line of quilting was 1" to the side of the creased diagonal. Then I used the guide with my walking foot to space the rows of stitching two inches apart. I quilted with 50wt Aurifil Dove (#2600), a light neutral that I thought would blend in well with all the colors.
The finished quilt is approximately 27" x 27". I machine bound with a medium grey solid after trimming the quilt. (This was the last photo I took, but I was able to steam out my diagonal creases before dropping it off to the fair.)
In January, Elizabeth asked us to make improv plus sign blocks.
Elizabeth provided this graphic with color recommendations (Red, Red-Orange, Pink, Violet, Lavender, White, Dark Green, Green, Yellow) and asked for 9 1/2" plus sign blocks that feel graphic and improvisational.
These felt like potato chips to me. So easy to not just make one.
I let the process of each block inform my decisions for the next block.
In my first block I created a green and yellow strip set to use for one stroke of my block. Before I trimmed it down, I really liked the shape of the yellow sticking out farther than the green.
So for the second block I pieced red and pink strips before making this strip sets. Red was my background for this block so this achieved the feature of the yellow pieces being taller than the pink in the finished strip. (It's a different proportion than the strip set for the first block.)
Following the same process I created a second strip set, leaving a larger center section. I pieced this strip into my red background before making a vertical slice to insert my first strip.
Blocks 1 and 2.
Blocks 3 and 4. In block three, I used a scrap of dark purple leftover from creating block one. And my dark green fabric was a small scrap, so I chose to use that with the dark purple to create the plus. Since these were both darks, I chose a lighter color that I hadn't used yet for the background. The plus is intentionally off center. In block four, I had cut a piece of white fabric as the background for a previous block before changing my mind. So I used that for my background. And my scrap of pink fabric was side enough to cut strips to insert across the entire width of the block. I hadn't used improv curves yet, so I went for a simple two-color block with improv curves.
Overall, I was happy with the variety of my blocks and I enjoyed working in the happy colors that Elizabeth chose for us. And now that I think about it, Elizabeth uses stripes in her work a lot. Maybe there was some subliminal inspiration for my first block. I look forward to see what everyone else creates for the prompt.
