Strip Piecing Intuitive Color Stories

1-Day 6hrs / All Levels

A great story begins with well-defined, diverse characters! Learn to express color abstractly by tapping into your heart centered, intuitive relationship with color through memory, emotion and environment. Move beyond fixed pattern color habits and theories around matching, to find your signature way of expressing color. Learn ruler-free strip-piecing techniques and abstract composition strategies for combining your diverse characters into a cohesive and harmonious quilt story, rich in conversation, meaning, and truth.

We all have a natural way of cutting strings and combining colors. A practiced improviser observes and is familiar with their intuitive sense of color and their signature cut. Just like us, our line and colors both evolve AND remain essentially authentic. —Sherri Lynn Wood

Skills & Techniques

Learn to piece abstractly and improvisationally through a heart centered approach
Basic ruler free piecing and strip-piecing techniques
Darting on and across the seam when patchwork bubbles
Ironing strategies to make the most of your line
Experiment with three methods of choosing—random, spontaneous and planned to move beyond habitual color combinations
Order of sewing / utilizing filler to equalize different size sections
Centering exercise to tap into your presence, emotion, truth and early color memories to create diverse intuitive color characters that carry meaning
Incorporate rhythm and strip width to further define characters
Composition strategies for harmonizing diverse color and rhythmic strip-pieced characters to tell a quilt story

Materials

Fat quarter and similarly sized scraps and/or up to selvage-to-selvage length cuts, in a variety of values, neutrals, shades, tints, brights. I recommend 50-70% solids so the focus stays on the patterns you make and not on the prints, but ultimately it is your choice. There is no fixed amount needed. It all depends on your size goals.
Bring at least one fat-quartered size scrap to share with the class.
Resist the urge to coordinate or “match” your selections with a focus fabric, or with a rigid, predetermined colorway.
Sustainable sewing practices such as shopping your stash and utilizing found materials is encouraged. Note on washing: If my intention is to wash a quilt made from up-cycled materials, I pre-wash and dry all my materials as I would the finished quilt.
It’s improv! You will learn something no matter what materials you decide to work with.