I’ve been working on a happy intersection of 2 quilty things:

1.  My MQG started a challenge at our June meeting.  We all brought 1 yard of fabric and randomly traded cuts with others at your table until you wound up with 4 cuts.  You didn’t get to choose your cuts, the cuts are of different sizes (1/2 yd, 1/4 yd, and 2 at 1/8 yds), and you didn’t go home with your own.  The challenge then is to make a modern quilt from your cuts and bring the finished product to the September meeting

These are my cuts.  I was really very lucky as they all blended together very nicely.  The one I got the most of was the zig-zaggy one.

2.  Our guild also hosted workshops this week by Victoria Findlay Wolfe.  She does amazing things with scraps and color, and I took the first day of her workshop on Thursday. It was a great workshop, I learned a lot and was totally inspired, but also completely overwhelmed with ideas and what to do next.  At the workshop I bought a few of her templates – the hexagon and the dresden.

When I got home from the workshop I so wanted to apply what I had learned, but was really swimming in my head and pretty lost.  After thinking about it for awhile, I decided to try and focus by drawing up a few parameters:

1. I’d make something using my guild challenge fabrics, and ONLY my guild challenge fabrics except for background fabric.
2. I’d use one of the two templates from my workshop.  I choose the hexagon.

Using Victoria’s technique, I cut chunks out of the fabrics and created improve “made-fabric” from the chunks.

I kept adding to the sides of the center starter house shape until I had something my hexagon template would fit on, then cut out the hexie.  I’m using a 5-inch hexie template.  If something needed more of one fabric, I’d cut off a side and add more of the one it needed.  These are some of the cuttings I made from all that improv:

After a few hours I had made 10 hexies with my new made fabric pieces and I ran out of my 1/8yd cuts.

Here they are:

Maybe a honeycomb arrangement?  Interesting that I wound up with enough of the ones with blue on one side to complete a circle…

I’m pretty happy with them, and went off to the LQS this morning to buy some background fabric to finish the top.  I need to decide on a layout, but I have some ideas in mind!

This was my second try at improv piecing and I liked it much better this time.  The first time I did it I tried to do it with strips from a jelly roll and that really was hard.  Also, Victoria’s technique was really helpful for understanding how to get the made-fabric going, and she was an awesome teacher with a great eye.

More coming later on the finished top.

Linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday.