Wonder Year Play

Today I set aside some time to do one of the April prompts that Zak Foster shared as part of our ongoing Wonder Year, and it was a playful and enjoyable experiment!

I decided to spend the time exploring working with leftover quilt blocks (from me and others!). It's something I love doing, but more often I take a long time and play with composition and turn it into a quilt for somebody. This time I worked fast and made three pieces:

Piece 1

Piece 2

Piece 3

And one of the best parts was, the other process I love that I had considered exploring during my play time is chain piecing lots of things, and I happened to be able to incorporate that too because I had a whole bunch of these tiny almost-four-patches (that became part of the piece in the first pic). There's something so soothing and lovely to me about machine piecing a LOT of the same thing without stopping.

I wouldn't say I followed the prompt precisely - these aren't intentionally related to each other per se, which was a really cool aspect of the prompt. Rather, I just picked a piece that made me curious and added to it until I felt done and ready for the next piece.

Not sure what/if these will become anything more than what they are, but it was wonderful to set aside some time for play and working with materials I love. As I was sewing, I was thinking about how some of my favorite urban planning examples are creative and adaptive reuse of existing structures and neighborhood layouts (like the former car dealership in our town that's now a restaurant, a school in Charlottesville, Virginia they converted into an amazing community center, and the old historic armory building in Portland, OR that they converted to a theatre!! I worked there for a time and it was so fascinating) - it's interesting to see this as a thread that I'm interested in in multiple ways.