Ready, set, go improv!

I am trying to finish more quilts in a shorter time period, which doesn’t mean that I necessarily need to sew faster, but I want to make decisions more quickly. I don’t expect to make a quilt in a day, but I have SO many ideas in my head clamoring to be quilts, and there is such satisfaction when you get to this point:

This one will be a surprise for a 3-year-old southern California boy who loves the beach and will probably grow up to be a surfer!

I played with different improvisational techniques to make this quilt, and it was really freeing—and fast! I pieced this roughly 5-foot square top in two sewing sessions of a few hours each.

For the first session, I had a little help.

At a recent Bay Area Modern Quilt Guild meeting, I demonstrated making a wonky log cabin block  from the book Block Party (written by my friend Alissa Haight Carlton and Kristen Lejnieks).

 

 Members sewed for 20 minutes, and beep, beep, the timer went off and we went on to another technique. Several members used my scraps from the Going Coastal collection of fabrics designed by Emily Herrick and gave me these great blocks (or pieces that became parts of blocks):

We also sewed scraps into bigger chunks of fabric. Victoria Findlay Wolfe calls it “Made-Fabric” in her book, 15 Minutes of Play.

She’s a great inspiration for getting yourself unstuck from a sewing rut, sitting down at the machine, and making decisions quickly.

These:

became the starting point for these blocks:

      We spent another 20 minutes starting work based on Gwen Marston’s quilt, “Chevron String Bar,” in her book, Liberated String Quilts (out of print, but available now as an e-book!).

 Adrianne (Little Bluebell) demonstrated the technique she used to make this quilt top:

 I had so much fun with it that I made these two blocks:

 And an oops! block with the remaining pieces:

One of the advantages of working at C&T is that we have a library of all of our books, and I can wander in there and browse for new ideas when I am stuck.  I never know what book or quilt will catch my eye or attention, or when I’ll find something I know will be perfect for that new fabric I just picked up at a shop or quilt show, or that I might have been hoarding for a while until I find the perfect project.

This one’s all finished, so I can work on getting more ideas out of my head and into fabric for another quilt!

Contributed by Alison Schmidt one of our Technical Editors! Thanks Alison!