Use all the tiny bits!

improv process, techniques

I save all the smallest scraps from my quilting work. Half an inch is enough for me.

I’ve made sample textures with this starting material: column and row grids, log cabins… In my first video talk about improv I show some of them.

I recently took out this starting material. I noticed that the yellow and the purple patches had some colours in common. Good starting point to join them with a few transition lines!

It was a nice occasion to experiment with walking foot channel quilting, having needle positioned at variable distances.

When I had almost completed my work, I changed my mind: no more landscape rectangular orientation, but rather a square with a twist. It felt like adjusting the composition with a move of the photo camera… a cropping zoom. A good occasion to face fear of cutting an already made work… and to feel it can improve.

Good that mini quilts are completed in short time. I gave it the title “transition”: like the two starting blocks that blended, in a transition from purple to yellow with different piecing shape.

Connected crafts

techniques

I have been drawing for several years, during my life.

My first sketchbook daily practice dates back to Primary school. Maybe I still have it, somewhere.

I’ve practiced several creative techniques during last decades: drawing, photography, painting on fabric, stitching, paper marbling, creative microscopy (that one was very addictive!), improv quilting (which added a relevant discovery: of quilting community!).

I’ve recently started to draw again, fine-liner pen on cotton paper doodle-type.

During the last exercise, I was surprised of how easily some spiralled clouds emerged from my blue pen ink work. Then, I realized: it was thanks to the long hours of free-motion quilting practice done while using that same motif: quilting spirals, indeed.   

The different crafting techniques one tries are connected to each other in some ways.

My photos of flowers were usually made in macro mode, so close-up that they tended to be abstract, and I tiled them in columns and rows like in a mosaic.

My first three quilts were aimed to represent a landscape; then I dropped that idea, and I continued mainly with abstract improv piecing.

My drawing re-start intent was to play with doodles and geometries, but it quickly turned into figurative subjects derived from my year-long database of photographs.

There is still a lot of room to learn, from this re-mix of techniques!