Monday, March 27, 2017

All That Improv

After surviving the year-long process of piecing my improv slab quilt, it seemed logical to gather all my individual blocks in one place and take note of the tutorials I used. Much credit goes to Matt Macomber/@odditease for planning the BOM and providing us with tutorials or at least suggestions on how to get started. So here's the rundown, with my added comments thrown in now and then:

One. Strings



Two. Triangles



Three. Gentle curves



Four. Crazy-piecing



Five. Squares

  • In Matt's words, "I cut a variety of squares from my fabrics, joined the squares into pairs, joined those pairs of squares into four patch units, and then assembled those four patch units into the slab."
  • My process ended up being similar to how Amanda Jean/crazy mom quilts begins her Scrap Vortex quilt.


Six. Pineapples

  • Jacquie Gering's tutorial, which includs a 'half log cabin' variation, shown in the right half of my slab, as well as the full block, on the left.


Seven. Quarter circles



Eight. Churn dash



Nine. Hourglass

Ten: Spikes

So there's a handy little round-up of improv quilt block tutorials to get you experimenting on your own. Have fun!

16 comments:

  1. Thank you! This is a lot of food for thought.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a great resource and round up of tutorials!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Totally inspiring! I'm teaching an improv quilt workshop in 3 weeks and I have to share these blocks to my students.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a great resource you have put together here Debbie. I am really new to improv piecing but it is something I want to explore this year. Thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for gathering these all together!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks so much for all the links! There's no excuse now!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks for compiling this! I want to go back and start this project and this will be so helpful!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Really fun line-up and good references. Those improv churn dashes remind me of a class I took at Houston from Roberta Horton, in 1990. She was teaching the first round of classes based on Gees Bend (second round has been lately), and while she called those quilts "utility" quilts, rather than "improv" the end result is the same. I think the current trend if improv has gotten a lot more mileage, though, as Horton was about 20 years ahead of us all.

    ReplyDelete
  9. What a great way to improve your improv skills--one technique a month! Thank you for sharing the resources and I just love your color palette. Are you considering putting all these improv slabs into a finished quilt top?!?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Thank you so much!It's great to have all the tutorials in one post.

    ReplyDelete
  11. What a great resource to have on hand!! This was a fun project of yours to watch!!

    ReplyDelete
  12. That is really good work, you did pretty good there. Thank you for sharing it with us, will be looking for more such posts

    ReplyDelete
  13. Thanks for pulling this all together in one place for us. We might be doing this in a group I'm in.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Wow, what a fun collection of methods!! Your samples look great together!!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Improv is definitely my weakness! Having links to these methods in one spot will be helpful! Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  16. These are really cool designs, loved you work. Thank you for sharing such wonderful post with us and keep posting such nice posts

    ReplyDelete