Resilience

In today’s blog post I want to share my recently developed approach to bring a quilt design from a sketch to the design wall and to become a quilt. This approach is most likely something others have done before me and I don’t claim ownership of the process, but it’s not something I learned from a book, website or class. I figured it out as I was making the quilt.

After finishing my quilt Perseverance and wanting to build on the same theme of abstract curves with black & white accents, I made a sketch a while ago that I kept coming back to, until I realized this had to be my next project. Since Perseverance was largely an improvisational quilt, I initially approached the new project in the same way. I just started cutting and put my pieces on the design wall. But I quickly realized I wanted to stick very close to my sketch. I liked the sketch too much to have my final quilt merely vaguely resemble it as I have done in the past, if I even made a sketch. But I also didn’t want to be so rigid as to create a pattern or templates to cut my fabric. The natural flow of a curved cut comes from within and I wanted to preserve that.  So I needed to estimate some measurements to scale it up from the sketch. Here is where it got difficult quickly. The balance between the rigidity of templates and the freehand cut seemed hard to find from looking at my small sketch. I had roughly outlined  the desired size for my quilt with 1/4” masking tape on the design wall and as I was staring at that I thought, what if I outline some of the sections I need to make with the same masking tape? I thought I would be able to take a better measurement for what size of piece I needed to cut the next shape from, and also to figure out in which order I best sew the pieces together.

My initial small sketch

How I started…

and found a better way…

After outlining the main sections (using red tape) I decided I might as well keep going until the entire sketch was on the wall. I spent quite some time with this, including some adjustments from the sketch as needed to make it work better for the larger scale.  The flannel on my design wall takes the thin tape really well and it’s easy to draw curves with it, just following the tape with my finger and sticking it down as I drew the curve on the wall.

Then I started cutting some more pieces, and making color choices on the fly. Although that was working well (I really like improvisational decision making), I’m also a planner by nature and I’m used to thinking a few steps ahead, a remnant of a long corporate career with a lot of complex project management. So with every improvisational quilt I set myself a few parameters or rules of what I want to focus on. I can break them anytime I want, but I like some boundaries in which I’ll work and avoid having too many choices, which can be overwhelming. 

After sewing the first part of the quilt together and as I started thinking about what color to start the next piece with, I realized I needed some kind of planning and looking ahead if I didn’t want to get myself in trouble with color and value distribution.The project manager in me kicked in and I started to put little scraps of fabric on the wall in each element as placeholders, while eying over the whole composition to make sure distribution and value got equal attention. This extended design process was unexpected and fun, and it brought my grey pencil-on-paper sketch to life. Of the whole process I probably spent the most time with this part. And only after I had all my colors auditioned did I start to cut and sew.  The photo below on the left still captures some of that - I forgot to take a picture when all the scraps were on the wall (too eager to start sewing).

Getting there…

…and finished !

This was a very different way of working from the improvisational approach with Perseverance, for which I worked from a rough sketch but ended up making quite a few decisions deviating from that original idea. And although with Perseverance I had picked a specific color palette, for the new project I had kept my options open. I pulled out some large scraps, and yardage for additional colors, but had no clear plan which ones I was going to use.  I just knew I wanted to pay close attention to values, and make sure I had enough repetition and equal distribution of the same colors. I did set myself a random parameter that I’d have either 3 or 5 pieces from the same color, and the black & white stripes are a returning feature.

I really enjoyed making both quilts. Perseverance was very improvisational and driven by a trip down memory lane. It’s a reflection that life is never a straight line, and only occasionally black and white, and that the search for your happy place is a journey, not a destination. 

Resilience (named for what it took to finish this) was made using a fairly structured and methodical construction method. The improvisational aspect came less from making the whole quilt, but from picking colors and making up the process on the fly. 

My biggest learning from making Resilience was that there is no one way to do anything, and it can be incredibly liberating to let go of preconceived notions. In my case that improvisation had to be an all or nothing concept, and couldn’t occur within the pretty strict parameters of a defined composition. 

Thank you for reading this far and following along on my journey. Maybe you find inspiration to challenge some of your own preconceived notions, or to try a new  approach within your creative endeavors. I’d love to hear your thoughts and invite you to leave a comment.