Improv Quilt Along Floating Squares Quilt

I joined Sherry Lynn Woods of daintytime's Facebook group for an improv quilt-along, using the scores from her book The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters.  Well, the book is in February's budget, so I don't have it yet.  It's on order.

The score for January was Floating Squares.  I watched the Facebook group as quilters posted their amazing creations.  I was and am inspired!

One of the challenges of caring for people who have predictably unpredictable special needs is finding a way to feel safe embarking on any venture, knowing that a crisis could and probably will arise at any minute and throw everything into another whirl.  I learned to color my hair only when my son is already home after having to make an emergency trip to his school to talk him down with dye coating my roots.  Schooling him at home this semester has halted the near daily school crises.   It takes a lot of time, but the energy goes into more positive things than racing for the school or having yet another IEP meeting.  My mother-in-law has severe dementia and broke her hip right before Christmas.  Her recovery was difficult, with lots of services to coordinate and appointments to take her to.  She had to relearn how to eat as well as walk and still needs a wheelchair for anything farther than a hundred feet or so.  Her memory care unit is great now that she is back there, but she had a rough trip through rehab.  I dreaded the phone ringing.

Creativity expressed through quilting and interacting with others in the various quilting communities are among the ways I keep my equilibrium. I am the only one in my family with an interest in sewing and textiles.  (You have to go back three generations to find any quilters and I'm the only one who wanted their now antique quilts and embroidered linens.) While I can follow a pattern, I feel a persistent urge to experiment--to get off on my own.  In addition, my best-laid plans are so frequently thrown into chaos. Thus, the draw to the Improve Handbook group.

Not wanting to get too far behind while awaiting my copy of the Handbook, I sat down yesterday to improvise on the theme of Floating Squares.  First, I got out a bag of fabrics I bought long ago because they were inexpensive and I could afford them at the time.  I didn't even like these fabrics well enough to store them with the rest of my stash.  Mustard is not my favorite color and yellow is the one color that really doesn't look good on me, regardless of shade.  Perfect for improvising, since, I reasoned, I didn't have any idea what I would end up with.  Surprise no. 1 is that I actually like the yellow in this quilt!  I'm okay with all of the fabrics in this application. There is a place in the world for colors I don't generally like.

I cut some squares and rectangles without measuring and some randomly sized strips of yellow and started piecing.  I almost never work with true solid colors, so this was an adventure in negative space.  I chose to focus on the negative space and allowing there to be lots of it--much more than I felt comfortable with at first.  Only a few of the blocks had fully framed prints.  Others had one or more unframed sides.  My original thought was that they would all be fully framed, but after awhile, it just felt like it as time to lay them out and see what happened.

The challenge from here was getting the blocks to go together in a way that could be sewed.  I discovered that I could spot adjacent blocks that were close enough in size that I could augment with more negative space to get blocks that I could sew together into larger blocks.  When I got stumped, I rearranged and even added the bright blue blocks and a couple more of the Byzantine-looking blocks to get the color distribution to feel right.  I made dozens of trips between the design bed (not a lot of space for sewing at my house) and the sewing table in the next room and eventually ended up with this.

This quilt is wheelchair-sized for my mother-in-law, and not so far out in design that she won't appreciate it.  The unconnectedness of the prints with each other reminds me of the way her thoughts and words are no longer connected by memory.  That, I feel satisfied by--that the creative process that started off without clear direction, found its way to express what I feel about my mother-in-law.  Though memory no longer holds things together for her or for us together, she remains a whole, cohesive person, beautiful in her unconnectedness.

The only dissatisfaction I have with this quilt is that it didn't live down to my expectation that I wouldn't like it!  Now, to quilt and bind it.