Back in 2017, Joe Cunningham (AKA Joe the Quilter) visited International Quilt Museum with his improvisational piecing techniques and it was really so much fun.
I take classes like this to expand my creativity and to get inside the minds of other designers and artists. If I end up with a quilt, so much the better.
I taught a class in Shenandoah, Iowa last week, and my hostess treated me to the progress on her guild challenge quilt. It’s remarkable so I wanted to share it with you. She started by drawing these four fabrics randomly, and at first glance, you might think that was disheartening.
Carolyn began with these four seemingly unrelated fabrics.
But Carolyn is nothing if not an adventurer, and she soon found the common element. What do you think it was?
My friends, the commonality among the fabrics was orange.
And with that, Carolyn went to town.
She made a medallion for the quilt’s center, repeating the fabrics several times to create cohesion.
She made Pinwheels and framed them with triangle-squares.
She added a little of this and a little of that, continuing to repeat the oranges and adding in some deep chocolate brown.
Can you imagine how exciting it was to sew this? It’s the kind of quilt where you make decisions as you go. You don’t worry about the end result while you’re doing it. You just make one decision at a time. The quilt pulls you along.
This is how the quilt looked when I visited at the beginning of April, but she’s not finished yet. More blocks will be added to the top and bottom, but knowing Carolyn, that plan could still change.
It was great fun to hear about her process and to see how well this project is shaping up. I love it. I don’t know if I could have made those four fabrics work this well!
My small quilt group issued a half-square quilt challenge earlier this year. The rules were pretty simple: The finished quilt should be about 24″ x 24″ and feature mainly half-square triangles. If you’re a new to quilting, that’s a commonly-used shape and it looks like this:
A square is cut in half on the diagonal, and the two resulting triangles are called half-square triangles, often abbreviated as HST.