Many of you also said you wanted to work on Denyse Schmidt’s “Single Girl” quilt. This one has lots of smaller templates and involves lots of small seams and accurate piecing. I have the pattern but have yet to attempt it, since I have had so many of my own projects to work on lately.
I will say, though, that I saw a tutorial by Ebony Love on piecing a totally different quilt project (my version of the Rob Peter to Pay Paul with Heather Ross’ “mendocino” line), and she had a trick that I thought was great: she used the tiny patches as her fabric leaders for the main piecing of RPPP, which I thought was a clever way to pick away at the myriad of tiny units for “Single Girl”. If you watch the first 15 seconds of the video, you will see what I mean. This might be an interesting way to do improv piecing, which would *really* be improv since there would be so much time between adding new pieces, right?
Come to think of it, I’ve seen some interesting quilts where people have made their own improv quilts using just this technique, like over at Brown Dirt Cottage. I know Victoria Findlay Wolfe has written a book Fifteen Minutes of Play where she uses made-fabric (I confess I haven’t read it), but I’ve seen several quilts over the last couple of years where people have used made-fabric to make larger quilt blocks.
I am actually thinking of one in particular that I’ve seen where the quilter made dozen of made-fabric blocks by just adding on to the fabric she was using as he leader each time, and over the years she had enough for a quilt. At the end, she put a white sashing around them and the result was awesome. I can’t recall where I’ve seen the quilt, though! I think it was in a show and I have NO recollection if I saw it in person or online. If you know this quilt, drop me a line in the comments!
In any case, here are some supportive links for the “Single Girl”
A Flickr Group
An improv Lazy Girl Quilt tutorial, which looks like great fun to do.
How to turn “Single Girl” into a paper-pieced project from Red Poppy Quilts (this looks to be my favorite if you want the exact pattern replicated, but I like the improv idea, a LOT)
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