Curvy, Modern, Red, Improv Scrap Quilt

Here's a scrappy, wonky and smallish (34" x 42") modern-ish quilt that I finished last year. 

Yeah, that bottom edge. Ummmm....I'm not sure how that happened. Probably because the project was pure sewing therapy.

It all started with a pile of  Japanesque scraps leftover from a huge project. I cut them into strips, then freehand cut improvisational curves. Next, I sewed the strips together horizontally. Here's the basic idea from a similar project with floral prints: 

(Pretend they're Japanese-ish.) Next I cut out tall vertical rectangles from the horizontal strip sets, and surrounded them with a solid fabric, either yellow, blue, or white.  

I cut the outer edges of the frames into more improvisational curves.

And then made a larger solid blue sashing across the top and down the left hand edge of the blocks. 

If you haven't tried freehand cutting curves, it's easier than it looks, and adapts itself to many different kind of quilts - art, modern, baby, etc. It was pioneered in the early 1980s by Canadian quilter Marilyn Stewart Stoller (who wrote about it on her website, here.) She taught it to many others, including legendary quilter Nancy Crow. From there it spread, Alison Schwabe, Ricky Tims, Debbie Bowles, and the improvisational and modern quilt movements popularized it. Bowles'  book Cutting Curves from Straight Pieces was my launch pad for this quilt. (No financial affiliation, but this is a terrific book, especially for beginners).

A couple of years ago, I wrote up a tutorial about freehand curve cutting and sewing, but here is a simplified version of the highlights. First, line up your strips in the order you want them. They should be at least 2.5" high (imho), and bigger is easier.

Place the first two strips together on your cutting board....

And overlap the top of the lowest strip with the bottom of the upper strip by at least an inch. Cut a gentle wave through both layers. (If you're only cutting through one layer at any point, you're doing it wrong.)

Move them apart. Discard the narrow slivers created by the curves. Bring the main pieces to the sewing machine, offset the tops slightly, and start stitching. Go slowly, and keep adjusting the strips as you go to bring the right raw edges together. 

Your seam allowance will often be less than 1/4", and that's okay. Consistency isn't as important as it is for straight-line stitching. 

Press well to eliminate bumps. 

Once the first unit is created, add more strips the same way. 

Now you have a strip set to play with. So much fun! 

I did some improvisational quilting, with (left to right) feathers, leaf veins, different feathers, and diamond eyeballs. 

Want more detailed directions for improvisational curves?
- Brilliant Australian art quilter Alison Schwabe, who learned the technique from Nancy Crow, blogged excellent instructions here. She has a free 2-page guide on getting started which she will be happy to send to whoever asks for it. "With practice," she wrote me, "one can achieve some quite pronounced freehand curved piecing, not just gentle wavy strips." Examples are in her Colour Memories gallery, here.  Contact her at Alison(dot)schwabe(at)gmail(dot) if you want her guide,  or through her website, here.
- A helpful video from Ricky Tims, is here.
- Nina Marie Sayre's excellent tutorial is here.
-  Debbie Bowles' tutorial is here onYoutube.
- My blog post about an all-denim quilt I made this way, back in 2014, with a detailed tutorial, is  here.

Beautiful Flying Citrus Kimono Life

I lived in Tokyo in for about a year and a half, and one of the great pleasures was the Japanese English, used as decoration, on garments, accessories, and advertising. It was inventive, earnest, wacky, and often poetic. I particularly enjoyed the corporation whose slogan was: "For Beautiful Human Life." Wow. That just sums everything up.

Another great pleasure of Japan was the extraordinary design and pattern, everywhere - on subway posters, billboards, magazines, and, of course, traditional items like paper, dishes, and textiles. This was before I was a quilter; I'd spend hours in paper shops, thoroughly grooving on each piece. Years later, after I became a quilter, I naturally began to collect Japanese fabrics 

But this particular quilt didn't start out Japanese, at all.  I'm not sure what I was thinking when I combined a trendy daisy print with a Jetson-esque heavy linen fabric featuring 1950s boomerang shapes, with, heaven help me,  grapefruit, pomegranate and grape fabric. I think I was looking at COLORS! And sewing strips together! It was some kind of therapy! I dunno?! 

After I acquired a Marilyn Doheney wedge-shaped ruler, well, no strip set was safe - I cut wedges on a slant, and next thing you know, I had this:  

                               

Mandala, medallion, whatever, as you can well imagine, it  sat in my UFO cupboard for a long time. Every now and then I'd pull it out and ponder. I really don't know what someone slipped into my coffee the day I decided that the medallion looked really great next to a swatch of kimono fabric. 

 It took me many more years of putting the thing away, pulling it out, potchke-ing around with it, putting it away, etc. before I came up with the striped background, the purple daisies...

...but wait, there's more! I took a class with Ricky Tims, and had a class leftover, which went on the lower left side - it looks like light coming in through windows. The painted fabric, inspired by a Sherrill Kahn book exercise, wound up on the lower right, and of course, the whole thing need three improvisational stars along the bottom. 

 

So here's what we have! Looking at it gives me a bit of a headache, but fortunately, my spouse loves it, and hung it in his new office.

 I hope it gives him a beautiful human office life.

Circular Quilts, New and Old

As a quilter for nearly 20 years (!), I have a particular passion for quilted circles, medallions, mandalas, Mariner’s Compasses, radiating stars, kaleidoscopes, and such. Circles make some of the most fascinating quilts, not to mention quilt books and tools  –  so, of course,  I collect ‘em all! Some of my favorite approaches to circular quilts:  

•  I’ve probably made a half-dozen quilts using Marilyn Doheney’s 9-degree circle wedge rulers, including the quilt at the top of this story. With this system, you strip-piece fabrics into sets, then place a wedge-shaped ruler in different positions on the set, and cut out wedges. The design possibilities are so infinite that a quilter named Sheila Finklestein wrote an amazing book called “Magic Quilted Mandalas,” showing a multitude of results that can be achieved by placing wedge rulers like Doheney’s onto striped fabrics – exclusively. If Finklestein had gotten into using multiple fabrics, not just one or two with stripes, the book would have turned into Wikipedia. Using Finklestein's approach, here's the center of a baby quilt I made using a single striped fabric for the central circle:
  

  

• Similarly, Cheryl Phillips’ “WedgeWorks” books use a 15 degree ruler, strip piecing and wedge-cutting at different angles to create satisfying circular stars.
  
• Bethany Reynolds’ bestselling and user-friendly“Stack’n’Whack” approach has quilters using the lines on their clear acrylic rulers to cut wedges. (This is a chuppah/wedding canopy I made using her techniques):

• Gail Garber’s spectacular “Stellar Journeys” book uses wedges which can be created by  paper-foundation piecing, or piecing from templates.
• Ricky Tims’ ‘Kool Kaleidoscope’ approach has quilters strip-piece fabric sets, cut them out with templates, then join sets, to make complex repeating wedges.

• At the top of the complexity and technical challenge scale, there’s Paula Nadelstern, queen of the kaleidoscope, with her incredibly intricate, plastic template-based construction.

• Far at the other end of the precision spectrum, I’ve enjoyed Dianne S. Hire’s book, “QuiltersPlaytime,”  which includes directions for  creating funky imprecise medallions, made with the wedge shapes that are strip-pieced and cut by eye.  

• (I have not yet read, but high on my wishlist are RaNae Merrill’s two books about spiral mandala quilts).

So, speaking as a circular quilt geek, I was pretty darn excited when I received a review copy of C& T’s book “Circle Quilts;Create Dramatic Medallions from Strip-Pieced Rings,” by Colleen Granger.

Like all the quilters named above, Granger is an innovator. She’s come up with a new way to subdivide a circle: Rather than creating wedges that start in the middle and extends to the circle or star’s outer edge, many of her circles are constructed in concentric rings. Each ring consists of repeated paper-pieced arcs. Completed arcs are sewn together to form the entire ring; and consecutive rings are topstitched together, using invisible thread and a small zigzag stitch, to form the medallion.

When rings are laid together, the colors line up to form unique designs. Like the image on the cover, many are angular, high-energy, and very striking, reflected in names like ‘Tornado Alley,’  and ‘Shazam!’ All three have unusual asymmetric lightening-like jagged shapes emanating from the center, some in a spiral. If I’d first come across these quilts at a quilt show, I would probably have stared at them for a long time before finally giving up hope of figuring out how they were done!

The book provides black-and-white drawings of each quilt, which you can color in, with spaces to glue fabric swatches.  The drawings, with their unusual subdivisions, are also works of art in and of themselves; it’s fascinating to look at the drawings and figure out how the color and shape placement in each individual ring relates to the next ring to create new shapes.  

There are also a couple of floral-feeling circle projects, including “Blooming Garden” and “Flower Dance,” which create the illusion of curves, when in fact all the piecing is straight lines.

Another interesting touch is that some the centers are constructed from many pieces. (Rather than just appliquéing one circle in the middle.) There are helpful tips for getting multiple seams to meet neatly at the center.

And there are directions for what Granger calls “power piecing”. The technique is copiously illustrated with photographs, which is a very good thing, because foundation paper piecing can be very confusing!

I’m wild about her ‘Labyrinth’ quilt;  it’s made up of tiny squares, but they’re not cut individually; for this pattern, the quilter makes strip sets, and those are pieced into arcs. She describes the (fun)‘brown bag’ method for randomly choosing strips for this project.

There are plenty of extras. Granger provides directions for finishing a round quilt; or, for setting the circles into a square or rectangular setting. There are also directions for mitering borders, and for four different pieced zig-zaggy borders that reflect the “lightening bolt” feel of the circles.  There’s a ‘Shazam’ pillow project, with instructions for adding piped cording, and installing a zipper (something quilters don’t practice much, so explanations are appreciated.)  There are directions for creating bias and straight cut binding; for making labels, and for creating hanging sleeves for circular and rectangular quilts.

An interesting detail: Granger says that, with her round quilts, “I insert stainless spring steel in my bindings to help hold the quilts round and taut.” I never heard of that before, but she refers the reader to her website www.sewlittletimequilting.com.  There, I found a product called “Quilt Shaper Light," stainless steel that is threaded into the binding to hold the quilt stiff – Pretty interesting!?   

I hope she writes a new book, soon, because I want more! More about how she develops designs, and more quilt patterns too!  

In sum, this book is fun, clear, brilliant and innovative - a worthy addition to the best circular/kaleidoscopic/medallion quilting literature, with excellent, clear directions that confident beginners and advanced quilters can use and enjoy.