#Improvquilting.
It can literally mean anything you want it to mean - quilting with no particular plan; using scraps or randomly chosen fabrics; playing with composition or picking a theme to try to work around.
It has also inspired me to try something a bit out of the box - a colour palette that I don't usually use (well, slightly out of my range but not all that far if I'm honest!). I pulled out scraps and leftovers from other projects, sewed them up at random and put them together. It's not quite finished yet, as I'm now concentrating on using it for a machine quilting pattern sampler, but you can see a few sneak peeks here...
I started by using leftovers from two or three of my recent projects and cutting them into strips and connecting them. Using the 'Trip Around The World' technique I put the strips onto the central flowery fabric. It has turned into something that looks a lot more complicated than it really is.
Once it was all together in one piece, I was a bit underwhelmed with the colour mix, so I decided to add a bit of orange and yellow into the mix before I put it together and started quilting.
Now I'm experimenting with the filler patterns, using freehand machine quilting, so I don't have a finished article just yet, but I will let you all have a look once I'm done.
Here are a few images of quilts that came out of this hashtag and were the ones to inspire me to do my own thing...
I just LOVE the bright plain colours of this one, and the large blocks that are unapolagetically uneven and in your face. It just seems so happy!
Mr_happy_accidents is one of my favourite instaquilters as he uses the medium in a very modern way, cutting, adding, quilting, framing different bits to draw your eye to different places.
The colours on this one are a world apart from the ones I am usually drawn to, but it has a very calming feel to it, with the muted colours emerging from the black and white as if they are shy.
So as you can see, the idea behind this word #improvquilting can be interpreted in so many different ways that it is almost a quilting world in itself. There are no patterns here, only your imagination, random picks, following a thread to see where it takes you. This is what I love the most about quilting. There is a tradition to it that cannot be denied, but there is also a bright new take to it that blends almost seamlessly with it but can be a breath of freash air for anyone tiring of traditional blocks.
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