Tag Archives: improv quilt

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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.)

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I have finished and submitted to my first SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) exhibition. The Northern California/Northern Nevada region issued a call last summer for a juried regional exhibition entitled Prism Play. From the start I loved the vision for this exhibition. The quilts are all required to be 15" wide by 45" long and monochromatic, following one of the color cards from Joen Wolfrom's Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool. The selected quilts will hang in multiple full color spectrum groupings during the exhibition.

In phase one we each signed up for a color (or colors) and were assigned one or more colors with the related cards of the color tool shipped to us. I learned really quickly that even though the majority of my fabrics are blenders and read as a single color, most of them have a little bit of white in the print. Black and white are not allowed since they fall outside of the monochromatic spectrum of the color card. I pivoted to using solids, and found that I had a reasonable variety of purple solids in my stash that matched the color card, including a variety of values. I later supplemented with a small fabric order.

Inspired by the recent bee "block" I made for Elizabeth, I decided to work in sash strips for the overall composition of my Prism Play quilt and set to work creating numerous two-fabric blocks exploring a variety of planned improv piecing and value contrast. I settled on a gradient placement of the block for the overall composition and enjoyed finding ways for neighboring blocks to interact or connect with one another.

I finished my quilt with irregular matchstick quilting, starting with walking foot quilting with even spacing and then adding irregular spacing with my lines on the second pass. The quilt was finished with a faced binding.

Submissions were due last week and we'll hear next month which quilts have been juried into the exhibition. Having seen some of the other work that was created for this call, I am looking forward to seeing this amazing exhibition hanging in a gallery! Congratulations to everyone who participated in creating a piece to submit.

Artist Statement

I enjoyed the parameters of working within a strictly defined monochromatic palette. This means everything is about the value, so I played with higher and lower value contrast in the components of my piece. Working in the time of a global pandemic, it is hard not to think about connections… how connecting to individuals has ebbed and flowed, and how those connections that are happening look different at this time. As I constructed the overall composition of the piece, I looked for ways to make connections between each section. The columns illustrate how a community is dependent upon each other, each member contributing the building blocks of the whole.

 

Edited to add: Read about the Prism Play catalog that I created.

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A few weeks ago I shared my new daily project, WIPs Be Gone with Leanne of Devoted Quilter. Here's a wrap up of all the works in progress I worked on during the first 25 days (of the last 100 days of 2021).

My commitment to myself is to spend at least 15 minutes (though often it's longer) making progress on a WIP. My goal is to finish 4 larger quilts before the end of the year as many of my finishes in the last year and a half have been mini quilts. You'll see that I'm still also working on mini quilt projects. In the next 25 days I'm gonna work to knock a couple larger projects into the finish column.

There's a bit of a theme in my projects so far: GREEN!

I spent the first week putting my Tac Tac Toe blocks into a finished quilt top. My WIPs Be Gone kickoff post lists all the Kona colors in this quilt and I absolutely love the palette. I'll be quilting it myself, but haven't yet basted it. This is atop my WIP priority list for the next few weeks.

I added hand stitching on my series of Personal Symbols mini art quilts from a summer class with Deborah Boschert. (hand stitching during Zoom meetings is great!) The next step on these is to add some free motion quilting before they are trimmed and mounted.

I finished the Positivity mini quilt that I shared recently. This was the project I spent the most time working on. I love the Kona Peapod background and always enjoy creating Scrappy Slabs.

I trimmed up my Waterfall quilt. It just needs binding, so I'll be finishing this in the next couple weeks, too.

And lastly, I worked on sewing together all my samples from the Improv Cutting Tips demo that I gave at the beginning of October. This blocks turned into a series of five mini quilts.

And I'm not just working on WIPs. I'm preparing for my first Improv Log Cabin guild class this weekend. And I'm also participating in Nicholas Ball's Improv Triangle Sew Along (in blue).

Oh and one more green thing I made recently. I'm taking a paper mixed media collage course and one thing we did this month was watercolor flowers and leaves with ink details. This is one of my favorites.

Thanks for visiting. I'd love to hear about what WIPs you're working on.