I’ve been teaching a class today on “Improvising A Quilt”. The women came with fabrics and ideas and wanting to explore ways of improvising on an idea and taking it somewhere.

What surprised me was to what extent the particular fabrics called for specific treatments. This one in particular – two complementary 1m cuts of Asian ombre prints both going from light to dark. They shouted out “conversion quilt“.  Jen hadn’t ever tried a conversion quilt, although I’d included a picture of one I’d made a while back and I happened to take that quilt to the class with me this morning. So convergence quilt it became.

Here it is – 22″ blocks cut from narrow to wide strips, interleaved and pieced, then cut again into narrow to wide strips, and interleaved, not yet pieced. This is going to be just lovely. The flow of colour and print detail is elegant. We don’t know, yet, how this quilt will develop beyond this central convergence panel but Jen has enough leftover fabric to come up with something that will work well with the panel.

This wasn’t the only fabric calling out for a particular treatment. Sheila had fabric to make something for her grandson – a fabric with images of soccer players, and three other fabrics with soccer balls, shoes. You have to keep the pictures of the soccer players intact – sash each then assemble them into some kind of quilt top? In the end she decided to offset the angle of the players which meant creating paper piecing templates for the odd shaped sashing elements and because the soccer player blocks were all different sizes, she decided to make all the blocks the same size which will make assembling the quilt top much easier. She’s gone home with four blocks completed. The sashings are all cut out and ready to be stitched to the soccer player images.

Nancy wanted to create a bed runner with Christmas fabrics using a slash and stitch technique – cut out blocks, slash them, piece in a narrow strip (usually 1″ which ends up 1/2″ wide), slash again, and piece, and maybe even a third time. She began with some red and green fabric scraps and inserted brightly coloured strips – but the focus was on the narrow strips. In the end she has elected to use a dark grey “grunge” fabric for the insertions which brings the focus back to the fabrics used for the blocks. Interesting how the fabrics dictate what has to happen!

We meet again in three weeks – enough time to complete piecing a quilt top. Then we’ll work on doing something interesting with the backs, discuss “in-the-hoop” quilting and get set up to complete the quilts. Looking forward to seeing how far they will have come.