Improv Composition 1 + video – and Pinterest Adventure Days 17 thru 24

I’m giving myself permission to use this quilt post to make up for several Pinterest Adventure days!  It was time for me to stitch something wide open and I’ve been wanting to incorporate various ideas I’ve seen into a modern whole cloth quilt so I knocked off a few saved pins in this one, along with a bunch of spontaneity in planning on the fly.

I’m not sure how many hours of stitching there are in this quilt;  I always think I’m going to keep track and then I don’t.  The funny thing is that my machine actually has a timer I could use if I wanted to check it out and learn how to set it.  But I’m always more interested in digging in and getting started and then I forget all about it!  I’m going to “guess” at about fifteen hours as it was over the course of (I think) three days and an evening when I first loaded it and couldn’t wait for morning to start stitching.

Every once in a while I need to do something like this.  Part of it is because I love negative space and wild quilting and blending designs together to make them look like they’re going in front of and behind each other all over the place.  Part of it is because I need to do an occasional “idea dump” to satisfy the part of my brain that is storing up all kinds of inspiration and eventually it just needs to come out all over the place! LOL Most of my pieced quilt tops and customer quilts don’t allow for this kind of thing to happen so  eventually I just have to plan for the opportunity 🙂

Here are a few photos (and by “a few” I mean far too many but they’re all so cool I couldn’t choose!) to show you my process.  Of course I can’t “show” you my thinking process, just my stitching one, but hopefully you get the idea … well, OK, the idea is that I hardly plan this out at all.  Which isn’t much help to you, I know, but in person I could totally keep you posted as to my thoughts along the way if you were standing right beside me while I’m quilting!  Of course that would mean a lot of hours, many of which would be completely boring to anyone else … which is why I didn’t try to capture it on video …

I did start out with a few lines on a piece of paper, just to block out a kind of sort of plan, which I transferred to my fabric in a rough draft sort of way …

And that’s about it for pre-marking.  You’ll see from the end result that I followed some of those lines and ignored others!  There were a few times that I made tick marks here and there after deciding to cross hatch or do something else that I wanted at regularly spaced intervals, just before quilting a space.

There IS a video below showing the whole finished quilt though and a quick frame telling you what I do with the marked lines, which is about as much as I can put into words 🙂

Just when I think I’ve found my favourite section, I change my mind 🙂

Whew!  Today I’m taking a break: my eyes, back, feet, and shoulders are begging for relief.  My brain is still going though and I’ve entitled this quilt “Improv Composition 1” for a reason …

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