Pardon my wordiness ... but here goes!
My improv experience started with a bucket of cool colored scraps about a year ago. I sewed and cut, sewed and cut until I have a stack of random sized triangles all of random sizes and shapes. That was the easy part. For some triangles I put a pale pink border around the triangle, others got one side or no sides in pink. Then I thought to myself, how am I going to piece all these random sizes?! No right angles! Clearly, I didn't think long. All these triangles went into a project bucket and were long forgotten. (Sorry no photos, that was B.B. Before Blog).
My improv experience started with a bucket of cool colored scraps about a year ago. I sewed and cut, sewed and cut until I have a stack of random sized triangles all of random sizes and shapes. That was the easy part. For some triangles I put a pale pink border around the triangle, others got one side or no sides in pink. Then I thought to myself, how am I going to piece all these random sizes?! No right angles! Clearly, I didn't think long. All these triangles went into a project bucket and were long forgotten. (Sorry no photos, that was B.B. Before Blog).
Over my February vacation (phew it's already been a few months!), amidst a cleaning and organizing spree of my sewing space I found these triangles. They quickly got placed in the quilt queue. A couple weeks ago, I finally laid them all out again and became immediately overwhelmed. The whole experience of them gave me a headache. I found a pale blue, lavender, a white print, and some solid cream fabric to start making the background. One would think with all the soothing colors, this would relax me a bit, oh no it didn't! As the sewing continued the pieces got bigger and bigger. At this point I still have no idea how all these random pieces are going to come together! Once again I looked at all the blocks laid out, then freaked out! Finally, I was desperate. I got out my 6.5 inch square and created 48 perfect little squares out of the mess of random angles and crazy. Ahhh, sanity.
The whole thing was a great learning experience. I have a huge appreciation to those beautiful improv quilts people post. I also learned to let go of some of the control, and go with the flow when quilting. My brain fought me the WHOLE time and eventually won (this time)!
Any professional improvers have any advice on how to piece a quilt that is laid out a certain way? The whole idea of creative negative space, didn't work for me. I need a simple technique that won't cause me to stress out or cut perfect squares?!?!
Sew Strong,
PATCH & CHELS