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This week the Project QUILTING challenge was based on a traditional block, 54-40 or Fight.

As the week progressed with no progress, my quilt plans got smaller and smaller. I finally made it into the studio with less than 12 hours left to the deadline.

I used the traditional block as a springboard and pulled some fabrics in a palette I enjoyed. I opted for a grid-based design instead of piecing the 4-patch units. Taking creative liberties I omitted the 4-patch in the center, in favor of a single square.

Then I improv pieced the triangle units before deciding that ...

The first Project QUILTING challenge of season 14 is The First One.

I am a habitual overthinker. I have a list of things I'd like to work into my PQ challenges this season and none of them were the "perfect" fit for this challenge. So the options to meet The First One theme seemed infinite. I brainstormed some ideas and considerations with my daughter:

• my first quilt
• my first blog post
• my first IG post
• red, the first color in a rainbow
• the letter A
• the number 1
• the first PQ challenge I participated in, PQ 8.1
• fabrics ...

I have finished and submitted to my first SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) exhibition. The Northern California/Northern Nevada region issued a call last summer for a juried regional exhibition entitled Prism Play. From the start I loved the vision for this exhibition. The quilts are all required to be 15" wide by 45" long and monochromatic, following one of the color cards from Joen Wolfrom's Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool. The selected quilts will hang in multiple full color spectrum groupings during the exhibition.

In phase one we each signed up for a color (or colors) and were assigned ...

This summer I started co-hosting the Quilts Unscripted Bee with a group of 10 quilters. It is an improv quilt bee and every month the host for the month gives us a prompt. These can vary greatly. There might be a limited palette. The prompt might be about a feeling, or a style, or creating something representational.

Sarah Ruiz kicked off our first month in June with a really fun one. She gave us a limited color palette and asked us to use solids. Then she had a sign up for each person to pick some letters of the alphabet ...

My passion is planned improv piecing. I enjoy giving myself a set of rules to follow (or break!) as create.

While demoing my technique in my All About Angles classes, I always cut up some fabric to show how I create my starting pieces. Sometimes these are part of a work in progress, but sometimes I just start with a new pile of fabric I'm excited to work with. In this case it was the latter. I started with five Alison Glass Kaleidoscope solids: Tomato, Sunflower, Raisin, Cherry, Goldenrod.

I was drawn to this autumn palette. As I put ...

I've been teaching All About Angles workshops since 2019. This project is actually the first quilt top that I pieced for myself in this style, way back before that time. I had selected the color palette, because these sunset colors called out to me and the pile of fabric hung out together on my shelf for quite some time before I cut into it to create this small quilt top.

Like many quilters, I've been wanting to finish up some of my WIPs. I participated in a 100 Day Project January 30 - May 10, free motion quilting for ...

I've really been enjoying connecting with guilds on Zoom. I recently joined the Ocean Waves Quilt Guild in Lewes, DE to share my Rules and Options of Planned Improv Piecing lecture and teach All About Angles. This workshop is one of my Planned Improv workshops where I present a technique and set of rules to follow, with lots of options for students to make the composition their own. From fabric choices to color placement, sizes and angles of cutting, and other unique twists, I love that everyone's finished projects look unique in the end. Here are the progress ...

I use the descriptor "planned improv" loosely. Sometimes the improv comes in the piecing. Sometimes it comes in the design work before piecing starts. In this case, the improv had to do with having no idea where I was going when I started piecing scraps together. And the plan was that HSTs would be involved, and I was working with a limited amount of scraps (at the beginning) with a limited color palette (that I'd curated for the bag of scraps).

This quilt has been a long time coming. The scraps that were the start of it predate February ...

I'm still playing catch up on showing you my finished improv log cabin mini quilts from my last 100 day project. You can see my green and yellow quilts in previous posts. Today, I'm sharing my red version! My main rules were to use black, white, and one color, and that my finished quilt would be 16 1/2" square, bound in black Kona.

In my red quilt, I chose to start with a traditional quilt block in the center of the log cabin. The sawtooth start block is one of my favorites, so I started with that ...

I shared the first of my five mini quilts completed during my 100 day project a couple months back. The project I actually started piecing on day 1 back in July was this yellow quilt. Day 1 started with these first five pieces sewn together.

I'd started the project with a plan for the color palette (black, white, and shades of yellow) and the intent to make a log cabin that would finish at 16 1/2" square. I'd chosen the three black and white prints you see here, and before I started cutting or sewing I thought ...

The products featured in this post were given to me by Aurifil, OLFA, and Michael Miller.

I'm excited to share that I'm today's stop for the final 2020 installment of the Aurifil Slice and Stitch Challenge. Way back in November of 2019 I signed up as one of the Aurifil Artisans to participate. I was very excited about the Color Builder thread boxes that Aurifil had recently released. (They are such a feast of color!)

For the challenge I received the Florence Brown Aurifil Color Builder with three large spools of 50wt in Ermine (#2312), Toast (#6010 ...

I submitted three quilts to QuiltCon and all three will be staying home with me come February. I'm bummed to not be able to attend the show this year due to a variety of schedule conflicts on my end. Congratulations to everyone who will have quilts hanging in Austin and to everyone who put their work out there and submitted to the show.

i mini

Pantone Ultra Violet All About Angles (also a workshop I teach)

Modern Antique Tiles

If you'd like to see more of the amazing quilts that aren't going to QuiltCon, check out the ...

The products featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik.

Today is my stop on the Island Batik A Piece Of... Blog Hop. I'm sharing my Mermaid Cove lap quilt.

I took this opportunity to make an All About Angles quilt with wider starting units. I enjoy teaching this class and every time I teach it I have more ideas for variations. A giant thank you to my students for inspiring me!

The quilt is approximately 65" x 75" and it was quilting by Tami Levin of The Quilted Lemon with Hobbs 80/20 batting. I ...