Urban Improv

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The BadAss Quilters Society recently paired up with Frond Design Studios (my favorite, favorite fabrics) for an Urban Brights Challenge.  I couldn't resist the opportunity/excuse to buy more Frond Fabric, so I purchased the bundle and away I went. Now, I am NOT an art quilter.  I would love to be someday, but I'm definitely not there yet, so I'm still undecided as to whether or not I'm even going to submit the pictures of the quilt, but I do love the final result.

I decided to go with improv.  I'm pretty new at improv, so it was a challenge for me, and definitely a step outside of my comfort zone.  I went with no binding, as it seemed to work better visually that way.  I quilted it myself, with a number of different motifs and techniques.  Overall I love it, even if it doesn't quite measure up to the competition!

I ended up taking the pictures last night in our shop.  It's been raining for what seems like forever, so I haven't been able to get an outside picture.  But it some ways the more "industrial" setting works, as urban graffiti in the country generates a bit of cognitive dissonance!

I wanted to keep the Peace panel relatively intact.  So I split it just once, and added some rail fence blocks between the two sections.  The left hand side is a mish-mash of improv blocks and styles.  


I think the lower left is my favorite portion.  I love the "LOVE", and how the quilting and wonky log cabin style turned out.  Fun side note - Keokuk county is where my grandparents lived when I was a kid, and I'm less than 20 miles from there now, so I definitely wanted to keep that in the quilt.


Lots of styles of quilting!  I used the specialty stitches on my Elna, some free motion quilting (behold my first attempt at pebbles!) and walking foot quilting.  There are some motifs from the dot-to-dot quilting class by Angela Waters in several sections, as well.


More dot-to-dot quilting!  I love the Frond Blenders.

The colors in these fabrics are just amazing.  It was hard to figure out how to quilt parts, and what colors to quilt, but I went with a simple loop here and like the result.



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