Tag Archives: planned improv

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Last month I had the pleasure of teaching Planned Improv: Scrappy Squares to each of my guilds. I had a great time and the quilters enjoyed learning my technique for some improv design... with a few rules. I led a 6-hour workshop for BAMQG, followed by a presentation and demo for Quilting 101 with SCVQA.

The first portion of the workshop includes some design work. Here's a look at some designs in progress.

 

Many of the BAMQG quilters, including Jaye, Diana, Joelle, and Michelle-Nicholle, finished their slab in class.

 

Since both of these classes were with guilds I belong to I got to see some progress and finishes at the November guild meetings. Sue, Marty, Mary C, and Mary M brought in their finished quilt tops for show and tell at BAMQG.

Mary C even made another Scrappy Squares slab as her contribution to November's colorist for Color My Quilt.

 

Bobi, Sandie, Patricia, and Sally showed their quilts off at the SCVQA meeting. Sally added ties and made her quilt into a sewing machine cover!

Thank you to BAMQG and SCVQA for having me. I had so much fun!

I was a classroom teacher for 11 years. I taught middle school math. This is the 8th year I've been out of the classroom and it felt so great to be teaching in front of a group again! My second workshop offering is in the works and I look forward to teaching to more guilds in 2018.

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The MQG Michael Miller fabric challenge for QuiltCon 2018 featured the Our Yard collection by Sarah Campbell. I love peacocks and knew from the beginning that I wanted to feature the peacock from the animal print.

I’ve been playing with Planned Improv and chose my All About Angles technique for this project, adding in fussy cutting to feature the animals. I visited Golden State Quilting, my LQS, to choose solids to coordinate with the line. I settled on Stone, Charcoal, Seafoam, Girl, and Watermelon, in addition to the Gold included in the challenge pack. Here's a peek at my design wall in the middle of my process.

I settled on a long, narrow layout for my quilt. It solved the problem I was having with the distribution of the animals and I liked how my eye traveled over the quilt.

For the quilting, I chose three motifs that each had horizontal movement and switched between the three for each row. On the animal prints I combined that row's motif with outline quilting around the feature animals and other elements. I enjoyed the challenge of free motion quilting around the animals as well as working with a palette outside of my norm. It's quilted with Aurifil Beige (#5010) in 50 wt. I liked that the beige had a nice contrast without being too dramatic. I think I need to invest in more neutral colored thread.

I love a striped binding and was happy use the stripe from the challenge pack for my binding. I got some help from my friend Mel for how to baste my binding with Elmer's glue. It was a hot mess last time I tried, but this time it worked out so well! Then no binding clips needed to hand stitch it.

 

All About Angles and Animals finished at 16" x 40.5". It was one of my two submissions for consideration to hang at QuiltCon 2018 in Pasadena, CA. Notifications are due out by the end of the month.

 

Coming in 2018!!

I will begin teaching my All About Angles workshop in 2018. This 6-hour workshop includes cutting techniques to build sections featuring complementary angles with no measuring and no math. Students bring a selection of solids, batiks or hand-dyed fabrics and leave with a  completed slab (larger than you see below) suitable for finishing as a mini quilt or building upon for a larger project.

 

I've linked up to the 2017 Q4 Finish Along link up. See my whole Q4 list here.

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I'm teaching my new workshop, Planned Improv: Scrappy Squares, twice in the next week. This Saturday I'll be teaching for Bay Area Modern and Tuesday I'm presenting at Quilting 101 with Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association. I'm so excited!

The technique for this workshop developed out of my work on the piece I made for the combination of the Greenery challenge and my guild square and rectangle scrap challenge, both of which concluded in May. I had two initial sketches, one of which developed into my Greenery quilt top, and the second of which was just pieced into this new 30" x 31" quilt top. I wanted to be able to share this variation at the workshop to show an alternative layout inspiration. This design is also different since I chose to use a single fabric for my background pieces. The possibilities are endless. ;-)

Thanks for visiting!

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