Tag Archives: improv

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In September, Elizabeth asked us to make an improv beetle. When I told my 16-year-old about the prompt (spoken "beetle" you can't tell the spelling) he asked if I was going to make John or Ringo. Haha.

Elizabeth's prompt asked us to make one large or two small beetle blocks, floating in a green (e.g. Kona Green Tea, Pear, Sour Apple, Kiwi, Clover, Pesto, etc.) background. Our feature colors were: black (required), dark pink (e.g. Kona Pomegranate), red-orange (e.g. Kona Chili), dark-ish yellow (e.g. Kona Grellow), and deep turquoise (e.g. Kona Oasis). I used them all with Kona Pear as my background.

I only took this one process photo, so I'll explain my process. I decided to use Pomegranate, Grellow, and Chili as feature colors in the beetle and pieces a wedge strip alternating pink, yellow, orange, yellow, etc. This strip ended up being about 4" wide and I cut it in half vertically. I initially thought I might piece blue onto both sides and then make horizontal slices to shift the sections horizontally and sew back together. But when I cut my wedge strip into two pieces I realized it was interesting to me to have the two sections vertically shifted in relation to each other. (Maybe you can imagine that if you shifted up the strip on the right the wedges would match up in the two strips.) So I decided to piece these strips as is to Oasis background. I made the wings of the beetle slightly separated by cutting a long skinny wedge of black that was just over 1/2" wide at the top and about 1" wide at the bottom. I pieced on a little piece of the green background to show that the body under the wings was slightly smaller than the wings. All the while I was mindful that I needed to fit my beetle into a 12" finished width with at least one inch of background on either side (per the prompt). This resulted in me trimming down the inner blur strips before attaching to my black/green wedge. I knew I would change the outer shape of the wings which would make the overall beetle narrower. And I decided on very small legs, eventually choosing 1" x 1/2" finished black legs. At the stage above I was still considering size and placement and my black scraps were used to audition options. In the photo above you can also see that I cut the head out of block and cut long black antennae, pieced on to green background at the top.

Beyond the above photo I decided to trim the outer blue strips narrower and to cut off triangles on each corner symmetrically. I cut a triangle off one corner and then flipped it over to use as the template to cut off the corner on the other side, repeating this process for the upper and lower pairs. Then I pieced three legs for each side into green background and added those strips and additional background to the body portion, then I put my three sections of beetle (antennae, head, body) together and added extra background at the bottom.

My finished block is a whopping 12 1/2" x 24 1/2".

I've seen just a couple other blocks from folks in the bee and look forward to seeing all of them together.

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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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In August, Emily pointed us to Bow Bridge in Central Park at spring sunny day by Helen Denisevich for our color inspiration. She asked us to choose two color groupings inspired by the vibrant colors in the watercolor and ink painting. She wanted a 12" x 12" block with a small section of one color group surrounded by the second color group. Any improv we'd like!

I loved the greens in the painting, ranging from yellow-greens into blue-greens, so I pulled fabric for that to be one of my groupings. Then I focused on the pinks in the tree and chose a variety of pinks, light to dark.

My finished block is approximately 12" x 12". The pink section in the center was informed by the shape of my scraps, starting with the largest triangle in the center.

The green section to the left of my center section was informed by scraps that were wedge shaped.

I pieced green strips for the top section, but when that was too boring for me I made a couple vertical slices to insert additional pieced sections.

I love having beautiful, saturated bold colors in a prompt. And the freedom to do any improv pieced we'd like meant that I could just play with the fabric. It was such a joy to create.