Over The Limit I

I have been slowly working on the finishing touches of this improv project. This one was actually the first in the series of Over The Limit. I liked the colorway of the second one so much that I finished it first. This one is bigger and measures at 40 X 40. I also like the quilting on this one much better. I knew when I put this one on the longarm that it required more than echos of the piecing like I had done with the orange and blue version. I began with what I knew in the upper right corner and that was to echo the fabric design. Then I moved to the middle right block (the light green one) and did my spiky swirls. I liked how things were going but I had run out of things to quilt and headed to the internet for multiple searches for ideas. I found lots of great art quilts and started doing a bit of doodling. I then changed the designs up a bit and made them my own. In the end I came up with a few things that I made up entirely.

Close up of some of the quilting designs that came up with.

 I think the swirls with the lines of wonkey parallel quilting in the two purple areas are my favorite designs, followed by the bubbles and the flowing parallel lines in the darker turquoise area.

 This quilt really spoke to me during the design process and I did do some sessions with Jack The Ripper but not too much.

A Great Start

The way that a seam is pressed makes a huge difference when you are quilting inside of the lines (not doing an allover design). I looked at this yesterday in the above photo and realized that the direction that the seams were going was just helter skelter. I have envisioned a quilting plan and the seams were going to be an issue. For my last quilt in this series it was not and issue because of the design choice I made. Well it was time to have a session with Jack The Ripper and pick out just the places where the seams needed to be flipped and resew them. It actually did not take as long as I feared. You can see the before in the top and the after in the bottom photo. When I originally pieced this I had no real quilting plan so I did not even give it any thought.

 So fast forward to the quilt on the frame. I have done something new which is to baste the entire top before quilting. That way it will not shift as I go back and forth with different thread colors. This is just a sneak peek at this quilt. It is the same piecing method as the orange and blue Over The Limit II but I am doing something very different with the quilting on this one. So far I am liking what is happening on the surface and think I have a great start!

Two Improv Quilts Finished

Over The Limit II

 I managed Three finishes for June. The first one was the Scrappy Trip Around the World I posted already. The Over The Limit series is something I have tried in two colorways so far. I actually decided to quilt the second one in the series first because I liked the bright vibrant colorway of the orange and blue. The quilting looks very simple and straightforward but it took forever. There were many stops and starts and Five thread color changes. Since I bury all my thread tails that made for lots of knotting and pulling those thread tails under the layers.

Over The Limit II (closeup)

 The next quilt is called Energy. It was the first thing that I stared in the past four years. I made it for a challenge for the About.com Arizona Quilt Retreat in Phoenix. The rules were very simple. The shapes had to be 2" by 2" or 4" or 6" or 8".  I had been looking at lots of improv quilts on Pinterest and found a few inspiration pieces. I loved the bright orange and deep blue colorway. I began by cutting the blue pieces. I pulled out fabrics and just cut the sizes above. Then I cut a series of orange and began laying things out till I liked the way it looked.

Energy

                     

Energy (closeup)

The quilting on Energy was really fun. I quilted lines across the blue. They are not spaced evenly........consistantly inconsistant. Some are only 1/8" apart. Then I did a swirling spike like little suns in the orange. I really love how this one came out.

Finding Your Creative Voice

Sometimes you have to be silent for some time to find your artistic voice. I have always loved creating things. With life events I had to step back from my creativity for a few years. It is the coming back that is exciting. When you have not done much in the way of creativity in some time you can begin again, but with a new prospective. This year I began my new series of Improv quilts. These are not about traditional, they are about color, shape and feeling. I really like how this one is starting to come together. I am very excited about what is beginning to happen with this new kind of work. It is no longer about thinking outside of the box. I forgot where I left the box and what the box was about. Instead I am thinking of spontaneous creation of color, shape and ideas. I really love this series of Over The Limit. It is really a variation of a very old traditional design called Drunkard's Path. Over The Limit is a more modern phrase for drunkenness.

The piece above is on the Longarm and is in progress. Only the top row has any quilting on it. I have continued to work on this and now all the blocks have quilting. I am slowly adding more quilting and more color with the threads. I not only enjoyed the piecing of this, but am now enjoying the spontaneity of the quilting process as well. This kind of quilting is new to me and I am really just making it up as I go. The color is really there, now it is about feeling and movement. I love the direction this is moving.