Poetics of Shapes

This month on the Quilty Nook, Cody Cook-Parrott gave a workshop titled Poetics of Shapes. I wasn’t able to attend live, so I watched the replay slowly over several days and it felt deeply resonant for me. I felt a recognition in the way Cody explained things - it felt so familiar, like coming home in a way - to the way my brain works, and to a growing freedom in trusting my intuition. As a new quilting teacher, I felt so encouraged by how Cody explains things - their bold, clear and confident style felt like an invitation to deepen my confidence in how I express my own style. I'm now doing a deep dive into Cody's Common Shapes podcast episodes (highly recommend!).

What's so interesting is that looking at my blocks and my work in progress, it feels tighter and more controlled than I would expect given the freedom and play I felt working on it:

I’m curious to see how this continues to evolve as I add more to the piece. One of the things Cody suggests in the workshop is not to stress too much about getting precise lines of sewing, but to embrace the wobble and use a slightly larger seam allowance. I am LOVING laying the fabric on my machine and guiding it through without my 1/4" foot - it feels like literally freeing it from the bounds of that rigid structure. I'm working on a very precise blocks project at the same time (moving back and forth between the two) - I'm not throwing away my 1/4" foot - but the intention to welcome in wobbly lines and flow with the stitches at the edge of the piece feels very very fun. Here are the original blocks:

Another detail I love is that all of these cuts are made ruler-free, with Cody’s “snip and rip” method (snip into the fabric with scissors, and rip along the grain of the fabric). This produced a very interesting sort of striation along the edges of my printed fabric, which I love:

I have the idea of this as a first in a series, making them big enough to donate to my quilt guild (min 30×30), but not making the call till I'm ready about whether they'll become charity quilts or something else. Somehow the thought of a size goal and the possibility that they will be useful/out of my house frees me up to play and explore even more.