The Albuquerque Modern Quilt Guild hosted a weekend of classes with Bill Kerr of Modern Quilt Studio in June.  Modern Quilt Studio is the partnership between Bill and his wife, Weeks Ringle.  One of my goals for the year has been to work on my design skills and two of the classes – The Role of Color in Your Quilts and Composition in Modern Quilts – sounded great to help me with my goal.

Both classes were just fabulous.  Bill was so awesome – knowledgable, entertaining, helpful, funny – I really enjoyed both days more than I can say.

A few of the quilts he brought – this one is called Glifs:

Here is another – I don’t remember the name of this one, but it is awesome, and I might do one myself:

During the classes we did a lot of quick little studies, mostly with solid fabrics and sometimes using just glue sticks rather than fully sewing the piece to play with new ideas and concepts.  This was a color study:

The majority of the last class, Composition in Modern Quilts, was taking the concepts we learned and creating a final project.  Bill gave us a few prompts to work with  – examining our vision of what static vs. dynamic looks like, scale and proportion, exploring hierarchy (of design elements), and engaging the edge – and set us off to design our project.  I chose engaging the edge as my focus.  This was the plan I drew up:

I had a bunch of grays in my solid stash and thought it would be fun to use a neutral for the blocks and the bright color for the background (the field, as Bill would say!).  As we were on a bit of a time crunch, I chose to make improv log cabin blocks because they were quick to do and didn’t require a lot of planning.  By the end of the class I had finished all of my blocks, and Bill nicely accompanied me into the quilt shop to choose a complimentary background fabric.  From there I just needed to put it all together.

I finished the quilt top at my quilt retreat in June:

I completed the quilting in early August.  During our class Bill talked a lot about how the quilting accents and augments the design of the quilt.  He also talked about ensuring that the quilting doesn’t overwhelm the design.  When he and I looked at my blocks and my plan, we decided that wavy lines that run off the edges would really compliment the design.  I started with widely spaced wavy lines in a darker gray:

My inclination was to add more quilting, but I was worried that the quilting would indeed overwhelm the design.  Honestly some of my wavy lines had some bobbles that I didn’t love, so I added more quilting to make those bobbles not stand out as much.

After quilting it was time to bind.  Initially I made binding from the red fabric, but decided that the ‘engaging the edge’ effect would really be ruined if I really didn’t carry it over the edge.  Because of that, I needed to figure out how to do a pieced binding for the first time in my quilting career.  It really wasn’t too hard – just took a lot more time!

Here is the finished quilt.  It is not very large – it finished at 24.5″ by 28″.

This was a great class and I learned so much.  I’m happy with how this quilt came out, and I learned a lot of concepts that will help me with design going forward.  If you have a chance to take a class with Bill, hop on it immediately!!

Linking up to What I Made Monday at Pretty Piney.

Also, this was on my Q3’18 FAL list, so I’ll be linking up at the end of the quarter.