Wednesday, August 4, 2010

A Rose By Any Other Name....

When I took my first quilting class, I learned about precision cutting and lining up the little points exactly.  There are fabulous traditional quilters out there who can do that.  I just cannot.  I suppose it's a matter of patience more than anything else.  I want to see the pattern come to life, and quite frankly, most people don't notice whether the corners are lined up exactly point to point.

Thanks to Block Lotto, I recently discovered the creative fun of "liberated" quilting.  Some call it "rule-breaking" quilting. In this type of quilting there is no exact pattern, but rather an idea of how you are going to sew your pieces together.  It's fun, but also challenging.  It's not so easy to throw pieces together.I don't want to end up with a mish-mash, but rather a well-balanced design.  I am definitely enjoying the process though.

These are two of my "roses" for the August Block Lotto. As those of you who know me, you'll figure I'm not perfectly satisfied with them.  In fact, I have reworked these blocks a couple of times, but I think they are okay.  I definitely will attempt some more.  I think I get a better idea of how to arrange the pieces to make it work with each rose I do.

And just so you know that I haven't completely gone off to the wild side of quilting, I'm also working on a very traditional sampler as a welcome wall hanging.  There's room in this world, and my life,  for all kinds of ideas.

1 comment:

sophie said...

I sometimes refer to myself as an omnivore quilter--I really do enjoy it all. I'm glad you found the block lotto and that you're enjoying the challenge of creating quilt blocks with a technique, some loose guidelines, but no pattern.

If you don't already know about the Liberated Quilting group on Yahoo, you might want to check them out--there's a link to join in the side bar of my blog, sophie junction.