What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

We have come to the end of our journey.  This is the final stop in the Positivity QAL 2021.

It took many emails, phone calls, scribbles and scrawls, and test blocks.  There were a couple of disappointments but many pleasant surprises. My hope was a dozen new quilts for the Mercyful Hospital. Bernie tells me that we have 19.  So far.

From Janine (Quilts from the Little House)

From Mary (Quilting is in my Blood)

Last month, I created blocks for E. A. She asked us "to think about how it feels when someone holds space for you and allows you to be who you are in a place that is safe. Alternatively, you could think about how it feels when you hold space for someone." She asked for abstract blocks created in pairs, with no limit on colors.

These pairs of blocks were created in parallel with each other. I didn't make one block and then copy it. I made two blocks at the same time. Since they are improv you can see ...

This summer I started co-hosting the Quilts Unscripted Bee with a group of 10 quilters. It is an improv quilt bee and every month the host for the month gives us a prompt. These can vary greatly. There might be a limited palette. The prompt might be about a feeling, or a style, or creating something representational.

Sarah Ruiz kicked off our first month in June with a really fun one. She gave us a limited color palette and asked us to use solids. Then she had a sign up for each person to pick some letters of the alphabet ...

Improv 9 Patch

This Improv 9 Patch continues to be my

summer piecing project:

I originally intended to make more triangles in several colors, but, I'll be honest, I got bored with it. So, Kona Orange and Kona Tangerine it is, with tiny pieced lines in Kona White. This finishes at just 12" square.

I ...

Though remotely inspired by photos of buildings I have perused on Pinterest, it doesn't really resemble any of them. I knew I wanted to do the windows with tiny borders, a technique I have played with several times in the past. I drew a simple ...

First my inspiration. I am often inspired by buildings, especially older buildings, and structures like bridges. Apparently I also have a thing for lampposts, as I have taken quite a few photos of them in different cities over the years. These two in London:

Recently, my friend Lisa posted a photo she took of a lamppost in France, which got me thinking about them again. Then on retreat last week ...

In the last several weeks, an idea has been percolating in my brain. Today I am putting it out there for the world (or at least a few of you!) to read, so that you can hold me responsible and follow along with my wacky plan. So here we go!

Much of this idea came to me after reading Lisa Congdon's book, Find Your Creative Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic. Actually, reading it for the second time, highlighting portions that spoke to me (honestly, it would have been easier to highlight what didn't speak ...

Now you see it...

The Improv 9 Patch is evolving...

Design Wall 1

 I shared a while back that my improv small group, Comedy Club Quilters, completed an improv round robin this spring. It was fun and different from past round robins because of the pandemic, thus I named my completed quilt Pandemic Porchdrop. I realized I never shared the finish with you.

We are 2 weeks into Hay Season...

It's hard to believe I haven't played with

Improv Piecing

for almost a year...

 My guild, the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild started a fun tradition a year or so ago. We have a big jar full of scraps. Every meeting, one attendees name is drawn and that person gets to take the jar the next month. They make a fun small item from some of the scraps, refill it to the top and then pass both the jar and the item on to the next person drawn the following month. It's been fun to see the cute little items everyone has made.

Finally, in May, my name was chosen! I won a darling ...

 My fantastic Improv small group (we call ourselves the Comedy Club Quilters) has done speedy improv round robins at the retreat center twice before. You can read about those here, and here. It's a fun event we always look forward to. But, like it has done to so many things, the global pandemic caused us to rethink our process this year. In the end, we pulled off our round robin with car swaps, porch drops, and maybe more than one quilt shop meet up (fully masked of course!).

I started out with this fun block, made up of a ...

I added the black/neon borders on two sides and finished off my quilt with faux piped binding (I wrote a ...

 Well! I certainly did not intend to take 2 months off from blogging, yet here we are! I have been making making making..... which is not an excuse but it's been fun. 

During Quiltcontogether everyone was sharing the cool things they were creating in their virtual classes. For a couple of reasons I had not signed up for classes, and I found myself feeling a bit of FOMO. A little digging in my WIP pile and I found some blocks I had started at Quiltcon in Austin in 2020. I had forgotten all about these and honestly had not ...