penny-studionotes-2

The second project I'm working on between stints on the art quilts is a version of a  pattern by Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle, "Plain Spoken," published in their book  Modern Quilt Workshop . I've had my eye on this pattern for a long while.  A couple of months ago I was looking at the many extra 2" x 3.5" rectangles I had left over from this shot cotton quilt .  Much as I love that quilt, I decided not to make it again, but to try something new, so I looked around for other patterns for which that size rectangle would work, and Plain Spoken came to mind.  I cut some of the rectangles I had in half, to get the narrower strips.  Each of my two-piece units finish at 2 x 3", while the Plain Spoken pattern has units that finish at 4.25 x 7.5."  So, the proportion is a little different as well as the size, but I think it still works out fine.  I'm piecing nine of the two-piece units into a block.  I need 158 of these blocks for a queen-size quilt. ...

I'm in the middle of working on two large art quilts right now, " Regret ," which I've posted about before, and another that I started recently, a self-portrait made with words.  These pieces are challenging to work on, and I like to have something easier that I can turn to when I need a break.  This post and the next are about two such projects. This first project I intended as a table-runner, but I decided I liked it enough that I wanted to see it more frequently, so it is now hanging on my bedroom door.  This piece is a follow-up to the work I did in an improv quilting class I took with Sherri Wood at QuiltCon in February; that work is described here .  Below is a photo that shows one of the pieces that from the workshop next to the larger hanging that I recently finished.  I discovered that it was more challenging to work on the larger scale--each gesture is bigger and so has more consequence.  The small piece was done quickly, working intuitively. ...