Scrap Leather

I approached February's Mighty Lucky Quilting Club challenge with some trepidation, and I'm not really sure why. The topic, Minimalist Improvisation, actually kind of excited me. I'd glanced at the handout by guild-mate Season Evans, and it seemed full of good info, and definitely an overall handy resource.



Bonus! At our SeaMQG meeting last week, Season herself shared about minimalist improv, her own work, and her participation in the club. Talk about a treat! She shared quite a few of her small quilts, which was really inspiring, and made me anxious to get going on mine.

When I cleared some time to attack the project at hand, I found the assignment in a format that really worked for me - very specific steps with photos along the way. Before I knew it, I had my fabrics selected. In the upper left hand corner is my focus fabric, a bronze-brown shot cotton. The rest of the fabrics in the top row are my coordinating solids - Osnaburg, a scrap of leather, and Kona Parchment. In the bottom row are my contrasting solids - some off-white scraps, and Kona White. It was all pretty neutral, but at the same time, it felt just right.

Following Season's assignment step by step, I finally settled on this layout on the design wall.

I was surprised how smoothly I was able to piece the elements together - kind of like a puzzle, trimming bits as I went along, as needed to make things fit.

My original plan (thus the piece's name) was to make the strip of leather my focus. But after reading through the challenge, I decided to make it a supporting fabric choice. Thus somehow it got edited down to just a small portion of the original. I was actually kind of disappointed, but I like how it supports the focal, so all is good.



What I wanted to do when it came to quilting, was to go very dense. I did want to avoid quilting the leather, so an all-over design wouldn't quite cut it. And I was a little concerned that over-quilting might conflict with the minimalist theme. But spurred on by my Instagram audience, I embraced the dense quilting idea, and did it in sections, using the shapes as rough guidelines. I used three threads - Aurifil 50wt #2021 (natural white), #2310 (light beige), and #2372 (dark antique gold) - and several quilting patterns. The straight line triangles on the left edge were something new for me, a design by The Inbox Jaunt.



All I can say, for bettor or worse, is that I enjoyed every inch of that quilting, and it seems to me to enhance the work rather than detract from it. For January's assignment, my finished quilt was 17" square, as is this new piece. A loose plan is to go with this size each month - large enough to give a technique a good try without overtaking my whole month of sewing. We'll see how that goes. Whatever, I really enjoyed this assignment and will definitely be exploring minimalist improv again.

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday.