When life gives you scraps…

…you have to improvise a little.

My last baby quilt left me with a bunch of HST clippings in aqua and teal hues. The scraps were barely 1.5” square,  would I have trimmed them up before sewing with them I might have ended with a grid as small as 0.5”. Nope, that wasn’t a day for tiny piecing and I don’t need much convincing to skip trimming in general. I was going to wing it that day and just piece those HSTs in the shapes they came in – no discrimination, just improvising.

And as just sewing, not pressing, not trimming, not measuring, not squaring felt quite liberating I kept on adding borders to the HST panel and found some more coordinating scraps to make a separate improv log cabin piece. I quilted both of them up with multi directional straight line clusters and turned them into a pillow cover with my usual zipper finish.

I’m your textbook perfectionist and quilting offers a perfect gateway to those of us who are. I’ve been trying to be more conscious about little flaws and imperfections that happen and to embrace them as part of the quilt making process and a quilt’s character. When improvising there are no points to be matched or measurements to be followed. Putting all that off the plate makes improv piecing an almost cathartic experience.

Also, for the first time in forever, this is a project that was not intended as a gift for anyone or served any other kind of purpose with a deadline to make. But it happens to work well with some new things in our home – this might be because I’ve been in a ‘colours of the sea’ phase ;-)

You can expect more improv content on veni vidi vicky next year, since I just joined a quilting bee focusing on this very technique. Talk to you soon and let’s raise a glass to all those missed points!

Merken

Merken

Merken

cushion coverhome decorationimprovimprov piecingquilted pillow