Tag: improvisational piecing

See my quilt at Virginia Quilt Museum

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My quilt, Light Coming Home, is on display at The Virginia Quilt Museum through December 20, 2025.

My quilt is part of an exhibit titled MODern Quilting: A selection of quilts from Quiltcon Shows.

Light Coming Home was part of Quiltcon 2023.

I started this quilt the week of the Eastern Kentucky floods. I grew up across the border in Southwest Virginia. The images of the debris entangled against the bridges and houses. The lives lost. I processed this through making this quilt. Lots of curves and sharp lines. 

When I began, I thought I would use more of the rust fabric, but it felt important to use the vanilla fabric as a dominant background with the black fabric and thread outlining each piece. Mildred Haun’s short story, Darkness Coming Deep, inspired the name of this quilt. It is the story of the death of a child. I wanted to express the opposite of that pain, Light Coming Home. This quilt represents lightness coming to me through the making of this piece.

A Cabin in the Sticks

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I made this quilt for the Modern Quilt Guild’s Super Scrappy Challenge, sponsored by American Patchwork and Quilting.

Improvisational work with scraps touches me in a way a planned design does not, but the work also makes me question my intuition. I’m not sure why some things work and others annoy me. In the beginning, I wanted to make lots of small log cabin blocks, but after making about a dozen I stopped because it felt like something I had seen many times before.

I moved onto strips of scraps. I chose them randomly from a large box of solid scraps. I tried not to cut any of the length of the scraps. When I pieced the long strips together, I loved the movement and the color combination.

I used almost exclusively thread from my mother’s sewing cabinet and I felt a connection to the past while creating this piece. I grew up in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, and I’ve often said I grew up “in the sticks.” The wonky sides make it real for me and create that organic feel I wanted.

It was not selected for QuiltCon so I’ll have to find another exhibit.

Viva Magenta!

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I began this quilt at the Slow Stitching Retreat in Washington, Maine, in August 2017. Heather Jones taught a class on Color Theory and improvisation. Before we began cutting any fabric, Heather discussed her love of the work of Ellsworth Kelly. She said, “His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing simplicity of form, similar to work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland.”

We were asked to bring solids in one color and a solid of a different color with white and off white. I chose yellows with green as the accent color.  We cut the strips without a ruler.

In the spirit of Ellsworth Kelly, I chose the strips randomly.  I put my blocks on the design wall and these were very muted.  A fellow reteater, Juline, was using purple in her blocks.  I exclaimed, “I need purple.” She gave me some purple/magenta strips and they made my blocks sing.  Heather also gave me some magenta to add to my blocks.

I didn’t work on this quilt again until January 2018 at a quilt retreat, then again at another quilt retreat in August 2018.  I finished the quilt top at the retreat. On the last day of 2018, I quilted it, and on the first day of 2019, I added the binding.  It finished at 32″ square.

So it’s now 2023, and I’ve had this blog post ready to publish for four years. The 2023 Pantone Color of the Year, Viva Magenta, reminded me of this quilt. Viva Magenta!