Inspiration for improv quilts on Fresh Quilting with Anne Sullivan (204-1)

[Music] hi my name is anne sullivan and i've been designing quilts for about four or five years now and design is by far my favorite part of the quilt making process and so when i started making quilts i ran into improv quilting and i realized that i could design it the entire way through as opposed to designing just at the beginning with with block-based quilts so today i want to talk about talk to you about design principles and elements and how i use them in a design as you go process with improv so here i have a quilt that i've started and um and so i'm pretty happy with where it's headed right now but it has a little too much energy for me so i'm going to use design to get where i want it to be so in design there are design elements and design principles design elements are the pieces that make up a design so that's things like color shape and line and as you can see here i'm using a lot of different colors but there's really only one shape this is made up entirely of rectangles as soon as you start combining design elements together that's when design principles come into play and with design principles the main thing to remember is that they're not rules they happen whether you want them to or not and the more you know about them the more you can control them in your own design so there's a lot of design principles but the two i use very frequently in my designs are contrast and movement so contrast is how different two design elements are so as you can see here we've got some colors that are pretty similar together so these are low contrast here because the colors are so similar whereas when you get places like this fuchsia and the chartreuse you end up with colors that are higher contrast and you can have design principles affect all elements so it's not just color there's also contrast and shapes so if i added say triangles to this design they would really stand out because they would be different from everything else and the thing to remember about contrast is the the more you use the less you notice it so here the chartreuse really stands out because i'm using so little of it but if i made a quilt that was mostly chartreuse you wouldn't notice it anymore so the other thing that i use a lot in my quilts is movement and that describes kind of the energy of the design so movement is described by where your eye goes and our eye is immediately drawn to these areas of high contrast and so our eye kind of bounces around especially with all of these shapes so one of the things that we also notice with movement is our eye follows lines and because there's all of these vertical elements our eye is moving quite a bit throughout this whole design so as i said at the beginning this isn't quite where i wanted my design to go i'd like it to be i still want it to be fun and colorful but i would like it to have maybe a little less energy so i want to talk through how i how i plan to change this design to meet my design goals so there's a few things i'm going to do so i mentioned that this is mostly vertical lines horizontal lines actually are they tend to be more calm than vertical lines think of somebody laying down or a horizon line whereas vertical lines is somebody standing up straight or a city building and the most active lines or the lines that have the most energy are diagonal lines and you can think of somebody running or even a lightning bolt and those all those both have a lot of energy to them so one of the things i'm going to do is move this from vertical lines to horizontal lines to help calm it down another thing you can do is add spaces for your eye to rest and so i'm going to add areas of solid color because those are the most restful and give myself a little bit of resting space in my design and then the third thing i'm going to do is i mentioned the contrast and how our eye is moving around to all of these chartreuse areas i'm going to start combining similar colors together and put them closer together so our eye doesn't have to move as far you may have seen rainbow quilts where the blocks are in rainbow order and your eye moves smoothly through that design whereas if you changed up the order so they were placed more randomly your eye would move around a lot more so one of the things that like i said one of the things i want to do is add some sashing and i've pre-cut a few of these strips here but i'm going to need another one these are one and a half inch strips but you can make them whatever size you want because your improv your rules but and i am a lefty so i did make sure to change this to accommodate my leftiness i just moved the blade over and now i have another one and a half inch strip all right so let's start redesigning this like i said i want to put like colors together so i have some strips that are a little bit darker and then i have some that are medium toned and then i have these lighter ones okay so as i said let's start with making this horizontal and i'm going to start adding my sashing and again this is to give it an area for your eye to rest and you'll notice that i used colors that are already in the quilt and that's because i want the sashing to be part of the design as opposed to a framing element all right put this like this all right and so i already like where this is headed because there's these areas where the sashing is interplaying with the blocks themselves and so you get these areas where the color is floating and if i had used a color that wasn't in the quilt design that wouldn't be happening so as you can see i'm using the lighter colors up here and it's already giving it a calmer feel then before when the colors were more mixed up okay just keep going so now i've moved into my medium tones and i'm actually going to change the sashing color here because if i had continued to use fuchsia it would end up feeling like a fuchsia quilt just because that would have been the background and it would have taken attention away from the fuchsia as i said the the more you use the less you notice it and also it's picking up this blue here and with this the change in the sashing color it also creates a new a new element where this almost feels like its own stripe so now we've got stripes and stripes and stripes all right so i definitely like where this is headed um and so i think the next oop i think i'm ready to try sewing some of this together so with with improv it's important to do some sewing as opposed to design everything up front just because as you start sewing it changes the proportions as you lose your quarter inch seams all right like i said i know that this is where i want it to go so let's try sewing so i'm actually going to try sewing some of these darker strips together and then i can put them up on the design wall and see how i like it okay so here i have the sashing sewn and i'm going to sew together these two strips and you can use pins if you prefer i tend to just go for it and of course watch your your seams here i like to put the seams on the top just so i can i can tell better when it's when it's flipping over so i also make sure to so when i'm uh pressing i make sure that the light colors are i press towards like colors and um you can press open or closed it's or to one side it's up to you but with my stripes i tend to press open just so they lay flatter [Music] okay i'm almost done great and so i do want to press this so you can see and with this many seams i am going to press to the side just so that this can lay flat and i do like to use a spray when i'm when i'm doing stripes just because it helps it lay flatter with all those seams so we'll press to one side here just so we have a nice flat block and we can really see how that design looks all right so now we have that block done and i definitely like how this looks even though it's even now that it's sewn um and so the next step is to sew this all together and i'll have a quilt top and that's how i use design elements and principles to inform design as you go with my improv you

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Views: 2,986

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Keywords: Fresh Quilting, The Modern Quilt Guild, Janome America, Inc., quilt designers, sewing machines, thread, sewing needles, fabrics, stitches, step by step, scissors, rotary cutters, patterns, templates, contemporary curves, modern quilt movement, Anne Sullivan, improv quilts

Id: t7UWDxEK5sw

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020