I gathered together lots of fabrics, probably twice as many as I need, but it turns out this was the right thing to do. They're sitting in a happy pile on my sewing desk, enough for me to rummage through and make choices, but not so many that it's overwhelming.
Here's where I've got to so far. Some of it is wrong. This is cool.
The classic book on improv quilting is Sherri Lynn-Wood's The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters. She compares quilt improv to jazz, talking about having limits and structures, but also freedom to explore, far greater than with traditional block quilting. She then has a set of quilt designs you can work through, and calls them scores. I think she actually means jazz lead sheets, and I'm enough of a pedant and a musician that this jars a bit for me. Musical scores are exactly what she doesn't want, because that is where everything is laid out precisely for you to read and perform. Anyway, I'm in the Facebook group for the book, everyone talks about scores there, and I do like the jazz comparison, so I may as well keep the terminology. As with all good quilting books, it's primarily focused on teaching you how to create these designs yourself, understanding the principles underlying them, rather than simply giving you instructions to follow.
Not that I'm following her scores yet! I may try some of them with later quilts. This one has a certain Gee's Bend influence, and it's also growing out of the first improv piece I made, that feeding mat for the cat. I limited myself to four fabrics and liked seeing what shapes grew out of that, with a basic log cabin approach to construction. Here it is before I quilted it. (I did self-binding, and before quilting at that, with no batting. Yeah, no, there's a reason why we quilt before binding. It was worth a try, though!)
The thing about not using a score, and also having to adapt due to sewing by hand throughout, is that I'm having to figure a lot out as I go along. I put an inch of backstitch at the start and end of each seam, for instance, so that I can trim down a bit after sewing. You can cut through a machine-sewn seam, and a lot of improv techniques are based on that, but you can't cut a hand-sewn running stitch seam without damaging it. Backstitch is slower to do but can be cut through, so this compromise works. I did try sewing three strips together with backstitch all the way through, so that I could cut them up in interesting ways, but aside from never wanting to do that much backstitch again if I can help it, the style is off for this quilt, and they're pinned up for playing with another time.
I also found that I can't cut through two pieces of fabric together as other people seem to be able to do, one just keeps sliding off to the side. So I put in a bit more fabric than I need with each piece, then use scissors or a small rotary cutter to shape that side once the piece is on, and draw along the edge onto the next piece to get my cutting line. Yes, I'm sure cutting through both pieces at once would be faster, but not when it doesn't work at all (and I tried changing position, weights, masking tape, the lot). This way it's already going to be accurate. Unpicking and resewing is even more faff by hand than it is by machine, and I avoid it as far as I can. I've just realised that I'm a victim of my own success in one way: I can piece with deadly accuracy, so I am not used to needing to unpick and redo something, and it doesn't readily occur to me as an option.
While I'm enjoying a spot of accuracy, I also mark a few points along the seam line. I draw in the corners, mark where there are any seam joins along the edge, and then use a ruler to measure the distance between these points, so that the corresponding marks on the piece to be sewn on are in the right place. It doesn't take long, a minute or two, and means that I can put my pins in the right place and have everything line up nicely first time, with no risk of having sewn one one piece that's actually longer than the other. After that, I eyeball the 1/4" seam, and even with the backstitching at each end, it's still significantly quicker than how I usually do piecing. My usual practice is to mark the seam lines both sides, and to keep checking that I'm on both of them while I sew. I load multiple running stitches onto the needle at once, so it's not as slow as you'd expect, and it's how I am able to do fiendishly accurate complex piecing, but still, it's liberating to be able to skip some of that process.
Going back to design, with the scores in the book, Sherri has done a lot of work for you already, figuring out what limits to set. I knew some limits already, such as the colours and bold feel I wanted, and am discovering others as I go.
Improv quilting seems to appeal to a certain bloody-mindedness in us all, and I think that's a good thing. I happen to enjoy marking, pinning and pressing, probably because I never made myself stick with traditional block quilts. I made one and moved on to making my own designs. However, I've spoken to quilters who spent so many years getting bored out of their skulls with those that they want an entirely different piecing process. One person said it was ten years, that she thought that was how you became a good quilter. No wonder they never want to look at a pin again.
I recently bought Nicholas Ball's book Inspiring Improv, and he's ended up so allergic to pinning and such that not only did he clearly hate putting in a troubleshooting section, but he really prefers to wing it, to the point where he had to cut one quilt in half because it was so far off lying flat! It's a stunning quilt, and was evidently a creative breakthrough for him, but I flinched a bit at that. Sherri has the technical skills you need in her book, and I'm glad I'm learning to do things like take darts to help keep the top lying flat.
For me, the "you can't tell me what to do" rebellion seems to be coming out in wanting to make my own designs from scratch. Or at least closer to being from scratch than following a score from a book, as I am absolutely influenced by the glorious work of other quilters.
In this case, going back to my photo at the top, the block on the left is too wonky to work with the others. I made it yesterday, pinned it up, and had a feeling something was off. I like that I've hit a snag, that I need to work out what went wrong and where I need certain limits to be. When I first made a trial block (not shown) to see if I liked this idea, I found that I did, but my trial block had lines that were too straight, the piecing was too small, and I decided against one of the fabrics.
With this one, it stems from that really weird and ritualistic way quilters behave around fabric. I have a smallish strip of a very lovely hot pink batik left. Quilting hoarding behaviour is kicking in, if hoarding is the right word. I have caught myself applying the word "beloved" to that strip of fabric, and it's a nice fabric but I was never quite that attached to it - hell, I don't even like pink much! So I tried to cut the largest piece I could as the centre for that block, and it ended up a lot further off square than the other centres. Then I tried running with it, adding more pieces with strong curves. I didn't want to waste fabric. I buy fairly small cuts of fabric anyway, most often fat quarters, and have always prided myself on cutting pieces from them in a minimally wasteful way, even with non-geometric piecing.
Well, my first block had lines that were too straight, and now I've hit the other side of that limit. I'm learning all the time. I'll unpick the outer three strips, I think I can correct it from there. I also now have a photo, so that I can explore these particular shapes later in another piece. It made me pause and think about which path I wanted to continue down for this quilt, and yes, I want the path on the right.
Another thing I'm discovering is what working pace suits me. I work slower than a lot of people in the Facebook improv quilting groups, and have long had machine quilters finding that a bit odd, because it doesn't click for them. Someone recently expressed concern that I could sew faster if I skipped the stage of putting an inch of backstitch at the start and end of each seam, even though I need that to be able to cut seams down after sewing them.
I've been thinking it over, and my response to that is, "It's improvised, not rushed." I'm happy working at this speed. (I should note that I can't do that much slower, embroidery or beading for instance are too slow and tiny for me.) The physical process of hand sewing is important to me, it's very immersive, and I can't sew that long per day due to my disabilities.
I like having time to consider a pattern, pinning my work up and staring at the design wall for a while every time I go into the living room. Readers, does anyone else stare at their design wall when they're brushing their teeth?
*hiatus for some more quilting*
Then there is a piece of solid purple fabric folded into a strip, and then there's the middle block, which I've added more to. The folded strip is pinned over a bit of the block that doesn't quite work. That pink strip in the middle at the top was wider, reading more as a square, and that threw the balance off, so I placed the strip over some of it and will trim it accordingly. I've been wondering whether a square in a spot other than the centre of a block would work, and now I know.
We're now at my partner's for the week, and I think it's in a good place for mulling over while I return to working on his quilt. The other half of his quilt needs to be marked up now, and I've been ill and really don't have the spoons for it. So the plan is that we'll do it together, and he'll do as much of the physical work as he can. Sitting at a low but big table to mark up a quilt is surprisingly tiring and hard on the legs.
