Covid Quilt Challenge #18: Improv Piecing—Lines

Well, it's been a long time, and we actually created these a long time ago, but I'm just now getting around to posting—better late than never, right?

We completed our last covid quilt challenge pieces in July of 2021. The technique we drew was "improv piecing", but since we had already done improv piecing with letters, we decided that we needed a bit more focus. We didn't want anything too limiting, so we ended up picking "lines". We both ended up doing a couple of projects.

My first one was inspired by our trip to the strawberry patch that weekend. As we were leaving, we could see the heavens opening up and rain pouring down on countryside ahead of us. There was a big patch of rain, and then a gap and a then another small patch that looked like it was directly raining on two people :D. As we drove back to town there was a clear line of where it had rained and where it hadn't. It was quite fascinating.

As soon as I heard lines, I thought about the rows of strawberries at the strawberry patch, and also about the lines of rain coming down. I dug out my green scraps, and worked some red bits in to them. However, because improv piecing is less planned, and I was working with really small pieces, I ended up either cutting out or losing most of my red bits to seams.

I dug out my blue and grey scraps for the sky, along with the rain clouds and the rain. I wanted to give the illusion of movement, so I alternated the light and dark greys for the rain.

Figuring out how to quilt it was another story. I wanted to do more than just stitch in the ditch with the lines, but also add to the piece rather than take away from it. I ended up doing matchstick quilting in the light parts of the rain—again to help create movement.

I quilted the cloud with loop-de-loops, and the strawberry rows with leaf motifs. I also added in some more strawberries with thread, since most of mine had disappeared. Plus I had the perfect fabric for the back.

I didn't quite have enough of it, so I had to piece it together with some other fabric as well, but I was happy to dig it out of my stash and give it a good home.

For my second piece, I dug out my solids and went for something colourful. I also decided to add some curves into my line—give it some interest.

However, yet again, my eyes were bigger than my stomach, or whatever the sewing equivalent of that is. Because of the size restrictions on the covid quilt challenge quilts, and my non-wasteful nature, I decided to turn it into two projects. I cut it into two distinct dimensions and decide to treat them slightly differently, but as part of a series.

For the first one, I decided to keep it simple. I got out all my fun, colourful threads (and a few of my friends) to go with the fun, colourful fabrics I had. I did simple curved lines to go with the curves of the design. I really like how it turned out. I think it it complements the piece really nicely and adds some more fun. I had decided not to do the left side of the piece because there really wasn't much fabric and I didn't think it needed it. If I had it to do it over, I would have probably put a bit more fabric on the other side so I could do some lines on the other side as well. But the point of these challenges was to get us outside of our comfort-zones and our over thinking, so it is what it is.

For the second piece, I decided to get fancier with the quilting. I split the piece into sections and then decided how I would quilt each section. The quilting was very tiny and required a lot of precision. I did the checkerboard pattern in the middle with small lines back and forth. It was tricky to not go too far. It was not a design I had tried before, but I enjoyed doing it and the look it gave. On the outside of that, I did pebbling. That was something I had experience with, and I enjoyed doing something familiar. In the last slots I did stippling. Stippling is a design that scares me—there's so little planning and I feel like I would back myself into a corner a million times. I decided I could conquer it in that small of a space where I also had an edge to go off of and come back in if I needed to. And I did survive.

One of the downsides of the covid quilt challenges, is that I got used to working on such small pieces. Nothing I tried took too much fabric. It was easy to start over or back up if needed. I didn't have to drag a whole quilt through my machine. And I only had to fill a small area with quilting. As much as I loved these designs and feel like they really added to this piece, they took a million years to do just on this tiny piece. I can't imagine trying to do this on any bigger of a piece, and I'm not sure I would be good at scaling them up. For now, I will keep them in my tool belt for smaller projects.

I chose to finish this one off with a blue binding.

The view from the back.

My friend chose to use this as a real scrap-buster opportunity. 

She dug out tiny leftovers from previous quilts and started piecing them together.

Because of the size and shape of her pieces, she ended up with some interesting seams. But once she put it all together and quilted on top of it, it all just blended right in.

She even used small scraps to piece together the back.

For her next piece, she dug out leftovers from another quilt she had done a number of years ago.

Again, interesting leftovers led to interesting shapes.

This time, she added in some black lines, to meet the line part of the design challenge, and also add some interest.

She quilted it with her walking foot.

And also pieced the back with leftovers.

Now that we're hanging out in person, it's less conducive to doing these challenges. We've also had our own larger projects to work on. However, I think we both enjoyed the process, adding to our list of techniques that we know how to do, and the stretching of our comfort levels with thing, so who knows, maybe we'll revisit it one day—there's still lots of ideas on the techniques list :).