I don’t make improv quilts – which the Modern Quilt Guild defines for QuiltCon as ‘…pieced improvisationally (without a defined pattern or template)‘. Defined patterns and templates are my happy place 🙂  But I like to borrow concepts from improv now and then – such as the wonkiness of this week’s blocks.

Improv quilts don’t need to be wonky, of course; many feature straight lines and regular units or blocks. But they often display a lack of rigidity and a more organic feel – based on a free-flowing approach where the whole design evolves as you sew.

There are lots of reasons why I haven’t tried making an improv quilt, although I’d like to try one of these days. But in the meantime, I can pretend by introducing a bit of a pseudo-organic feel to a Sunday sketch. (Chaos through order!)

I love this design in just two colours, because the restricted palette really highlights the wonkiness of the design, at the same time as revealing the repetition and regularity. You can see that every second block is the same; you might also be able to tell that all the blocks are the same, but half are just rotated and colour-reversed.

   

   

   

   

I love the two-colour versions, but I also love a limited palette in a kind of random arrangement. Mostly ordered, with a bit of irregularity. Manageable chaos, if you will.

   

There are lots of ways to colour the design to accommodate a two- or three- (or more-) colour palette but still retain some order. Here I’ve used the same colour in a similar position across all the blocks, although all these versions have slightly different colour placement (regardless of palette).

   

   

   

Or I can use a multicolour palette with each block in a single colour (plus a bit of background colour for consistency across the design).

I also like the idea of going overboard with colour (although I’d no doubt find it hard on my eyes haha).

   

I’ve always got a little voice in the back of my head reminding me that I’m trying to be a modern quilter, and this design might not count as ‘modern’ (at least by the Modern Quilt Guild’s definition). If I were making this one for a modern show, I might remove some pieces, add some more negative space and asymmetry, and generally try to make it a little more visually interesting.

That’s just my first attempt; I’d try harder to get a better balance across the design, I think, and maybe introduce some slightly different colours/fabrics to make the quilt pop a little more.

Anyway, this week’s sketch doesn’t feel terribly original – it’s just a variation on a log cabin block, after all. All I did was draw a centre square in Electric Quilt 8 and then surround it with three more square-ish shapes made up of non-straight lines. I tried to make sure that no adjacent lines within the block were parallel. They tend to head in different directions, which creates the wonkiness.

I had a look around Pinterest (‘improv log cabin quilt‘) and Instagram (#improvlogcabin or #modernlogcabinquilt) to see if I could find quilts using a similar design. And while there are a ton of improv log cabin quilts, I didn’t find too many where the log cabins feature concentric wonky squares in solids. The closest examples I could find of quilts with a similar feel to this design are ‘Flash‘ by Leanne / She Can Quilt, ‘Love Shack‘ by Mary Menzer, and even ‘Log Cabin Play‘ by Louise Wackerman / @imfeelincrafty. Although obviously you can see there are clear differences too.

The feel of this design reminds me of something that I can’t quite put my finger on – maybe mid-century modern furniture, or those angled TV sets from the 1950s? My husband thought it was reminiscent of Hanna-Barbera cartoons (like Top Cat, The Flintstones, etc.). I knew exactly what he meant, although googling didn’t reveal any similar artwork. It’s just got that playful, cartoon-y feel, I guess.

I doubt I’d actually make this design into a real improv quilt (without templates or patterns) – I’d be far more tempted to create a paper-piecing template and rotate/repeat the block exactly as I’ve shown here. This could be a fun project to have on the go over a long period – maybe tackling a block at a time whenever I had leftover fabrics from another quilt?