Magic Carpet

The first few weeks of the year, I was on a mission to create 12 quilt tops at least 30”x30” each. My inspiration was the “snip and rip” method I learned in Cody Cook-Parrott’s Poetics of Shapes workshop on the Quilty Nook - something about the way Cody explained and demonstrated things tickled a part of my brain that was ready to spring into action and make a LOT!

I sewed my way FAST through 9 quilt tops, and when I finished the ninth one, which Dan titled “Magic Carpet” it felt like an “aha” moment:

It felt like an answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking - like all the fast, instinctive piecing I’d been doing was leading to this piece. For the other 8 tops in the series, I snipped and ripped from large pieces of fabric, creating and assembling shapes. To construct this piece, I used scraps from all the other pieces and from my bins, working with the preexisting shapes to build something. I think that is a very comfortable and familiar way for me to work, and this piece feels like “my voice.”

Here are the first 8 pieces, all made between Dec 26 and Jan 9:

This process was purely for my own creative exploration, and it was so joyful and fun to go BIG - most of my improvisational piecing so far has been quite small, at the scale of a greeting card or mini quilt. By challenging myself to work bigger, I was able to literally expand the size of my palette and the scale of my creations - I felt such a sense of freedom while working on these pieces.

An unexpected outcome of this process is that once Magic Carpet was on my design wall, it felt so clear to me that it will be the sample for an upcoming workshop - I’ve been wanting to teach ruler-free quiltmaking, but didn’t have a clear sense of how I wanted to teach it. Seeing this quilt top and thinking about all the play that helped it come about gave me a vision of what and how I’d like to teach. Stay tuned, coming soon……