Quilty Pleasures-Mi Familia

Friend Ann, owner of my local quilt shop Threadbear, asked me if I'd like to work with her on a quilt, so we have been collaborating for a couple months on something very different.

The center panels are from a collection by Jesus Cruz called Mi Familia (My Family) by Andover fabrics.  I apologize for the photo quality. I think I messed up my phone camera lens so everything looks a little fuzzy.

We thought it would be fun to work on this quilt collaboratively, not really knowing what the end result will be,  making parts like the four patches and flying geese and trying them out as we go. Some parts we made worked, and others were, "What the heck was I thinking?"

Working by the seats of our pants can be scary and absorbing at the same time. "Stop Staring and Start Sewing!" is our refrain.

Mi Familia is still a work in progress, but the way Ann decided on the orange border is neato: Ann had a quilt top in her "whoops" collection. You know those projects you start and almost finish, but have enough misgivings you don't want to complete them? I have a few of those and I'll bet you do, too.

Anyway, the discarded quilt top looked like this, but multiply it by a zillion circles because this is just a piece.

Ann cut each row of circles in half. We thought a scalloped border would be interesting and tried that, but then she started playing around and staggered the rows of half circles until they made a type of serpentine pattern.

She's been fussing around, sewing the two half circle rows together, offset, and making sure they are all the same size. As you can see in the first pic, Ann needs to fill in some spots which requires cutting and matching half circles, not always matching the fabric.  Recycling in action! And it looks really cool!

I made some flying geese using hand dyed fabric supplied by quilting friend Linda S. and the "sky" for the geese is a cosmic, spacy looking black fabric.

There are still more borders to go, so we will keep you posted on how it's going.

Have you ever made a quilt with someone else? Have you ever "winged it," not really knowing what you were going to do with your quilt before you started?

If you haven't, take some time to play a little.  Whether you call it liberated, intuitive, or improvisational quilting, you will have a real mind stretcheroo and may find yourself standing and staring at your in-progress quilt for much longer than you realize.

You may even start dreaming about your quilt. And that's a good thing!

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