Here we go! The fourth and final week of the #30DaysofimprovQAL organised by Amanda and Shannon has been all about curves.

I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a relief to reach the end of a learning experience I’ve found rather challenging! I had imagined improv was all about feeling free and easy, go with the flow, let the creativity emerge. Hmm! I think I’m too much of a skills and techniques gal to be able to switch to ‘just do it’ mode without a bit of preparation to feed my confidence levels. Anyhow! I’ve been learning on the hoof and before I get embroiled in my conclusions I’ll share my learning from Week 4 🙂

• Monday – cutting curves can take a minute to get used to. Use today to get comfortable with the motion of cutting gentle curves and get a feel for piecing your waves without pins.

I kept things simple on Day 1. Joining relatively large pieces of fabric together with gently waving seams.

I did enjoy cutting the wavy seams and piecing them I know the words ‘improv’ and ‘enjoy’ have appeared in the same blog post! I went large scale thinking to keep this piece for the slicing & dicing later in the week.

• Tuesday – small piecing can draw the eye in. Explore this concept by piecing smaller curves.

Two small(ish) curves rather than waves. I cut both of these in half to create Four Patch blocks (see photo below).

Two curved four patch blocks framed by more curved piecing.

• Wednesday – break out of the standard wave and add a bigger ‘hump’ to your curves to see how that varies the look and shape of your blocks.

Deeper curves – I did use pins to help me keep these seams reasonably even!

• Thursday – it’s slice and dice day! What new shapes can you create by slicing your waves up?

Big blocks from Days 1 & 3, sliced, diced and mashed together into a mega block.

• Friday – explore what happens when you add negative space to your waves. What effect does that have?

Can you tell the improv vibe had deserted me by this stage in my exploration of improv curves? The big X kind of sums it up – maybe it should have been in red ink?

The final mega block cut down into three 7.5″ blocks and a mess of off-cuts.

By the end of the #30Days improv challenge I had a collection of sixteen 7½” blocks up on my design wall. Four blocks from each week: Stripes, Polygons, Triangles and Curves.

Out of the sixteen I’ve chosen four that do appeal to me: two Stripe blocks and one each from the Triangle and Curve challenges.

My pick of the bunch.

I have learnt a lot from working through the improv challenge. I do like many of the improv quilts that I see pop up on social media and in blogs. FYI I recommend looking up Linda at Flourishing Palms; Carole Lyles Shaw; and Jenny Haynes at PapperSaxSten (more modern than purely improv) to see what can be achieved with improv techniques.

Conclusions: I like many of the improv quilts I see; I’d like to learn more about the techniques involved; I should have followed the advice to use fewer print fabrics and more solid fabrics; I don’t like itsy-bitsy slicing & dicing – bigger scale improv would suit me better; I will return to improv patchwork, maybe to make wonky versions of traditional blocks but probably not to chop up pieced fabrics just to see what they’d look like with other chopped up fabric!

Signing off at the end of #30DaysofimprovQAL

Allison