Workshop Fun

As I said earlier this week, I taught for the Maye River Quilters Guild in Bluffton, SC.  They are an enthused new guild that has leapt from 29 to 88 members in 18 months!  I was their first visiting teacher and lead 26 members through two Value and Spontaneity Workshops.

 

I've shared some about this valuable exercise last summer HERE and how I set it up.  Once everyone arrives the trading and stirring begins.  This gal was so beautifully organized it was a shame to make her mess them up!

The trading is done in sets of 10 triangles with 5 other participants.  That means that 25% of the triangles used are from someone else's fabrics -- so participants get a few colors they would not have included or large prints or stripes, etc.  Shakes things up a bit!!

And then everything is thrown into a bag and stirred up good!!  I loved Cindy's idea to hang her bag from her nametag so both hands were free.

So did Nancy!  They had fun moving through the exercise side-by-side!

Sometimes it took two to keep everything on the temporary design walls.  Just minutes after I took this picture, the piece on the left slide down in a crumple on the floor -- ahhhhhhh!

She reacted very calmly!

Once everyone had their version laid out, I directed everyone to decide what they like about theirs before we began to survey the room and refine the layouts.  This to me is the most valuable part of the workshop!

The fabric arrangement is random -- two triangles are pulled out of a bag, decide which is light and which is dark and put them into the correct position working across one row at a time.  At the end, after some reflection, small changes are made to refine the piece before the stitching begins.

 

To retain the spontaneity of the piece, it's important not to over correct.  Some imbalance here and there improves the visual interest of a piece and holds a viewer's attention longer.  Everyone was surprised by the ability of medium value prints to switch from light to dark depending on the value of the second triangle in the pair.

 During the Saturday workshop, one of the gals reminded us that we had a great value finder tool in our pockets -- our phones!  Soon phones and tablets were out and everyone was exploring how to set it up for black & white pictures.  It certainly makes it easy to evaluate areas that need some tweaking! You can quickly switch a couple mediums and darks to break up an awkward area to give it more definition and clearer lines of contrast.

This is one I made several years ago -- the pieces always reflect the taste of the maker -- I have lots of florals, so there are lots of medium value prints in this piece.  In general, the more colors, the busier the print, the more likely that it functions as a medium value fabric.  It's an easy donation quilt to make plus I learn more about value manipulation each time I make one.  I cut scraps into the right size triangles and drop them in a box until it is full enough to make another one.

The arrangement above is the class project but there are lots of other layouts for this exercise.  Each time, I enjoy auditioning for the border since there always are several possibilities that would work and which one I use depends larger on my mindset that day.

For those of us focused on traditional quiltmaking, value is the element of fabric selection that makes a design work or fail so this exercise goes a long way at building understanding and confidence.

 

The spontaneity element of the exercise is designed to learn how to make fabric decisions with less effort and have more fun doing it!!

 

I never tire of teaching this exercise and love all the variation and excitement of it.  Of course everyone loves everyone else's and is disappointed with their own, but doing it in a group helps everyone recognize the gaps in their fabric stash and that's valuable. 

The challenge is to go beyond deciding you "like it" or you "don't like it".  One also needs to get specific about the "whys" so you can learn to control your choices in the future.

 

So get together a group of friends and try this out for yourself!!

 

And I can't finish today without a nature picture -- rose-breasted grosbeak (male) in my backyard!!

 

Mary Huey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



A Value and Spontaneity Exercise to do with Friends

This week, I'll be teaching in Springfield, Ohio for the Remembrance Quilt Guild.  It's a Set-In Piecing Simplified workshop using a scrappy tumbling blocks quilt as the project.  As I was packing my workshop samples, I got to thinking about how much easier making a spontaneous, scrappy quilt is for me since teaching the spontaneity and value workshops based on Gai Perry's classic book, Color From the Heart.

 

 

Earlier this year, Joanne over at Everyone Deserves a Quilt asked how I organize that exercise and this is what I shared with her.  I'm sharing it with you today because I think it would be a  good warm up for your fall quilt making activities.  Invite a few quilting friends, a minimum of 5 to 6 people is best -- more is fine, to join you.  Here's how I set it up.

 

Everyone cuts 4" squares into triangles -- usually two squares each from 50 fabrics so there are 200 triangles.  When the group gets together, everyone trades 50 triangles -- easiest, fastest way to do that is to count out 5 stacks of 10 triangles then trade each stack with a different person. 

The amount of time for the session determines whether or not the group does any sewing. 

For a half-day session, there is no sewing.  After the trading, put all the triangles into a brown paper bag.  Have a piece of flannel or cotton batting set up for a "work wall".   Pull two triangles out of the bag, decide which is the darker of the two and then position them on the flannel depending on the overall layout being used. 

For an all-day session, after the trading is done everyone sits down with their bags, pulls out two triangles out of the bag lottery style and stitches them together -- no cheating -- chain piecing should get most quilters through this step in a hour to an hour and a half. 

 

Press the seams towards the darker triangle.  Then back into the bags they go again.  Now begin to draw out the HST's, one at a time, and place them onto the "work wall" in the correct position for the design.  Expect to whine a lot at this point but just keep pushing through!!

Everyone starts at the upper left corner and works across the top row until there are 10 HST's in place.  Then begin the second row at the left end and just keep going until the piece is 10 across by 10 down.  Once everything is laid up on the work wall, it's best to take a break. 

After about 5 minutes, participants should then come back to their work and they can make minor adjustments.  First though it's important to identify what they like about the spontaneous layout.  An important part of the exercise is to experience the spontaneity and see that when you are working with fabric you enjoy, it works well.  An example of a minor adjustments might be something like there are only 5 aqua triangles in the entire piece and they are all clustered in the same area -- then it's good to scatter them around so they don't draw the eye to that area but rather serve as a "bit of sparkle" here and there. 

It's helpful to the group to make part of the exercise walking around and looking at each participants work wall, talking about each piece, identifying things that work, and paying attention to how they feel about each other's pieces.  Doing this quadruples the effectiveness of the exercise.

 

It's easy to overwork these pieces by switching so much around that the piece loses it's spontaneity and becomes too controlled to be interesting.  The unexpected is what makes a quilt interesting!!  The two fabrics in each HST don't have to be coordinated or match -- the light vs. dark positioning carries the design.

There are lots of options for the overall layout.  Usually I have everyone do the same simple arrangement but it might be fun to have several arrangements and randomly assign different ones to each participant?  I've never tried that.

 

This is the last one I did.  They are fun to make and the final border really brings them to life.

And they make cheerful charity quilts as well. 

 

My charity group just had some books donated to us to sell off to raise money for our batting.  There is a copy of Color From the Heart available if you are interested!!  $10 plus shipping -- just leave me a comment!!

 

Hope your week is off to a good start!!

 

Mary Huey

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