Impromptu 2

Impromptu #2
Hand dyed and commercial cottons, machine pieced and machine quilted.
23.25"x25.5" $250 Email me.
Second in the 'Impromtu series' for 2013. My sketchy plan was to use the scraps that were on the table and begin to find the design. I made a much bigger composition, looked at it on the wall and photographed it. Taking it to the computer, I sliced off part and rearranged it and decide that a smaller section was superior to the whole. Then I added a bit of new (from my stash) fabric to balance it and add contrast.
What's important to me is that my hand dyed fabric should be integral to the design, the thing that makes it unreproduceable. The strength of the design lies in its simplicity, leaving the fussiness on the cutting room floor, so to speak.
The quilting lines are a more open grid, and the quilt is faced rather than bound. I like the clean finished edge.
I may return to Impromptu, but I also found an old sketchbook and ideas that I was once hesitant to make now seem to be enticing me.
One quilt a week is allowing me to think a bit in the interim, always a good thing.
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I keep my Nancy Crow book at my fingertips, while designing, as a hand holding device. When I first got this book, a few years ago, it was overwhelming to look at the collection of her work. Everything astounded me. I mean everything. Now after looking at it religiously almost, I can pick out specific quilts that I really love and others that are..um...not as loved. What this tells me is that it took making the 'not as loved ones' to get to the loved ones. Know what I mean? Also, Nancy doesn't comment on each one, telling us how she feels about it, comparing it to the previous ones. So we assume that she has the same feelings about them all. I doubt the veracity of that. And when someone else does the quilting, she can focus more on making the tops, letting go of the unfinished pieces and later seeing them returned, all quilted. What does that do to the creating process as she moves forward? These are unanswered questions but it does help me see the work as more human-made and less other-wordly-miraculous.

Something in the inner recesses of my brain tells me that if I continue to make a weekly quilt, I might find myself making things I never dreamed of. That's my hope anyway.