more improv

Maybe I should rename my blog "ellyn's improv place"? Can you tell I'm totally hooked on improv? I find it so freeing to just sew things together until it looks right. Most recently, I've been limiting myself to small samples, just to try different techniques. This one is my take on Sherri Lynn Wood's Score #6 from her book Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters. Our Improv small group, the Comedy Club Quilters, decided to play around with it this past month & this is where I landed.

Basically this is an exploration of modern flying geese. I used gray and yellow, the colors in our guest bathroom (maybe I'll hang it in there eventually?) and my sample ended up 10"x12" (never mind that the examples in the book are all considerably larger, even bedsized). I quilted it on my domestic machine with random wavy lines...... done and done! 

Retreating with the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild

Last weekend, our guild had a day retreat at the Best Little Retreat Center in Texas. Such a wonderful facility... AND you get to go home and sleep in your own bed at night. Can't beat it. 

There were so many wonderful projects in the works....

I finished up a couple of children's quilt tops to send to my mom. Her church group is working on quilts for each of their Angel Tree children at Christmas...

And I finished up this quilt top, with improv Xs made with the strip sets from the Sherri Lynn Wood workshop I attended last fall. I think I'll add some borders to make it big enough to snuggle on the couch.

A fun and productive weekend for sure!

Improv Round Robin Quilt

Back in November, I shared the process when the Comedy Club Quilters Improv small group did an improv round robin. Since then, my quilt top has been hanging on my design wall crying out to be finished. Presented with a gap in my "Must finish immediately" list, I got to matchstick quilting it yesterday.

Originally I had thought I would make my topper into a bag. The longer I looked at it, the more I wanted it to be a quilt. In the end, I'm very happy with my decision.

My finished quilt is 24" x 28". I added a block of each member's signature fabric across the bottom, but otherwise left the improv topper untouched. Today I finished it off with solid black binding to frame the whole piece out.

Big thanks to Bonnie, Trae, Chris S, Chris D, and Susan who all had a hand in this quilt! What fun it was to collaborate with all of you.

And thanks to Sherri Lynn Wood who literally wrote the book on Improv and inspired our round robin.

Joy! Word of the year 2019

Every year I choose a word of the year. It's always a process for me to choose my word. I begin keeping lists in the fall of possible words for the following year. Sometimes my word is very clear to me. Other times, not so much. This year, the word Joy came to me at the very last possible minute!

I want to be very intentional about choosing to be joyful every single day this year. I finally got around to making my Joy quilt yesterday.

The colors are not quite right in this photo.... I chose fabrics that closely mirror the Kona color of the year (Splash!) and Pantones color of the year (Living Coral). I think they play very nicely together.

This is the year I WILL hang all of my word of the year quilts! I have nine now.... quite a collection! and they have been sitting in a stack for years. Enough of that!

Do you choose a word? What's your word for 2019?

My finished Solid Seven bee quilt

 As promised, I have a completed bee quilt to share with you today! The ladies of the Solid Seven bee are so amazing. You can read more about them and our different prompts of 2018 here.
Back in November, I asked the gals to all make me Christmas trees, any pattern/tutorial, original improv trees, whatever they wanted. I did give them a color palette of teal/aqua, red, green and pink but beyond that I gave them very little guidance. Did they ever come through for me!

Such a great variety of trees came my way, all shapes and sizes. My local quilty friend Chris insisted that I needed a gnome in my forest (she was right). She was sweet to make me one. Piecing all of the blocks together was great fun. My friend Diann at Happy Quilts provided the awesome longarm quilting. I finished it all off with a faced binding, mostly because I really couldn't settle on a color to bind it in. I think this works perfectly. The finished quilt measures 58X60.

I can't wait for my next turn to select a bee prompt!

big thanks to my handsome quilt holder hubby!

Contributors to my awesome tree quilt are:

Nicole

Jessica

Tracy

Laura

Briawna

Ailish

EA

Chris

Happy Quilts

Check out their instagram accounts!

Solid Seven bee 2018 blocks

Well here I am... one of my goals for 2019 is to write more regularly on my blog. I'm not off to a great start, aren't I? Ah well, lets look forward, shall we?

Today I'd like to share all of the blocks I made in 2018 for my beemates in the Solid Seven Bee. This group of ladies is amazing and their prompts always challenge me. We all "met" on instagram and we work strictly in high quality solids.

Our first prompt last year was from Nicole. She asked us to make collage blocks with at least one block representing something from our childhood. My childhood block was all about board games

Jessica was up next, with a request for improv doors. This was really fun, as I dug out my London door photos from our trip in 2012 and recreated three of them in fabric...

Kara wanted an ocean themed quilt..... I pieced together 3 fish for her...

Briawna asked for wonky log cabin blocks, Gees Bend style, to make a quilt for her husband

Ailish requested modern rainbows with improv curves. Mine were all different from each other...

Tracy's 80's blocks were a blast! She has recently pieced her quilt top & it is the bomb! Check it out on her instagram.

It was my turn in November and I had the gals make me all different Christmas trees. Stay tuned for a finished quilt soon

Laura had us made quarter log cabin blocks with "striped" and solid logs. Her quilt is going to be a riot of crazy color!

I'm working on my January blocks now. EA has asked us to think of a time when we felt seen/heard/loved and use this as inspiration. Here are my first 2 blocks for her. First a music note, because ever since I was a small child I felt heard when I sing or play an instrument.

My second block represents my sweet husband who has always made me feel seen/heard & loved! 

I need to come up with one more block and ship them off to her soon.

Check out our hashtag, #thesolidseven for more inspiration!

Dalton quilt

Well. I sure didn't mean to disappear for a whole month, but here we are. I could blame secret sewing, holiday travel, sickness.... blah blah blah. You don't need to hear the details of all of that.

I've been waiting to share this quilt with you until it was safely in the hands of it's new owner. Leigh Anne, my oldest's best friend was married last month and I had every intention of finishing this up and getting it to her before her wedding. I actually started it in July! Plenty of time, you'd think. Well she has it now and I hope she and her new hubby enjoy it together for many many years.

The pattern is the Dalton Quilt, from Kristi Larson's book Southwest Modern. The fabrics are all Moda Bella Solids, sorry I do not have the color names. Oh, and it was beautifully quilted by my friend Diann at Happy Quilts...

Hubby and I had a great time with the photo shoot at a park in our neighborhood.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season! All of the Z Kids will be home in the next couple of days & I am looking forward to a house full of love and laughter.

Improv round robin

Yesterday was a fabulous day! Our improv small group (the comedy club quilters) had a sew day. We had been planning for quite a while to have a lightening round robin, like Sherri Lynn Wood describes in her book. We finally had the opportunity to do it yesterday. Six of us gathered at a retreat center and set to work.

Before we even arrived, each of us had prepared our center block....

Each person passed their block along to the next person, along with a basket full of curated fabrics (my fabrics were all black and white). Also, each person had a "signature fabric" which they added to each quilt that came their way (my signature fabric is the aqua print in the "center" of the black & white block). We allowed ourselves 30 minutes to work on each quilt (Sherri recommends 20 minutes but that didn't sound like enough for us). The only stressful part for me was that the girls bullied me into running the time clock! ok, bullied might be a strong word, haha, but they did twist my arm.

Gosh this was fun! I took before & after pics of each quilt I worked on (so prepare for photo overload!)

Here is Trae's beginning block:

I picked up on the red in the rooster & added my signature aqua:

Chris D's quilt came to me next:

and I added a strip carrying the orange print across:

Next up was Susan's very large quilt!

I sliced and diced a strip set to make a narrow border:

Chris's quilt had a spot that needed a set in, y seam block. I chose to ignore that and leave it for Bonnie to solve. Nice of me, huh?

she had a lot of gray in her box and no one had really dipped into it. There was also and orphan block which I added to my hashtag row:

Last up was Bonnie's quilt:

I thought it needed another big punch of that school bus yellow!

The afternoon went by so fast! I expected it to be stressful but it was so much fun. Here are our finished quilt tops....

I can't wait to see how everyone finishes them off.