Free form piecing

I love the free form piecing style that is so popular with the modern quilters.  Katie Pederson was the featured quilter in Walla Walla this fall and I thought that her quilts were a perfect example of that style.  She has an amazing sense of color and playfulness.

My latest quilt is an incorporation of her ideas with her "On Target" quilt and my colors.

"On Target" by Katie Pederson

My stash of fabrics is overflowing with green so I pulled some out and added others that have wild loud colors or are complimentary to green.    I started just cutting random strips about an inch wide and tossed them into a pile.  Then I randomly sewed the strips together to give me a colorful strata.    I also pulled a more sedate pile of fabrics that I thought would go great with the bold strata.

Strata 

These fabrics include some of the Grunge fabric that I really like right now, as well as some shiny ones that I found in Sisters this fall.

As usual when I start a new project and am trying to figure out how to cut and piece the quilt top, I have been  barely able to go to sleep or stay asleep.  I could see where Katie pieced this top in triangle sets, but I had to figure out how to get that wonky look.  (She does teach this class, but so far not in this area!).  After quite a bit of ripping out and trial and error, I came up with a method that is working for me, but is probably not the most efficient way of making this quilt.

After I sewed the strata, I cut them into 1-1/2" sections, pieced them together into one long strip, and attached two pieces of the first fabric.  (I'm mixing up my photos a little bit, so I hope you can follow along.)  In this example, the fabric sewn to the strip set is the darker gray.

The next piece to get sewn on is the color that will be the smallest triangle.  In this example, I started with white for the first two pieces and then added the turquoise.  After pressing this strip set, I cut a triangle off the strip set, making sure to keep the tip of the small triangle at the top.  The next step was done to get the piece to look wonky.  Just trim the bottom (first) piece at an angle and sew on the color on the longest side.

 When I was happy with the look, I trimmed this piece a little larger and matched it up with the next triangle in the quilt. This is a real puzzle!  One triangle is the top in one square, and the bottom in the next one.  This definitely saves fabric, but is a little confusing.  A color coded chart would probably help... as well as sewing sometime other than 3:00 A.M.

After sewing the center seam and pressing and starching the block, I aligned the center seam on the diagonal line of the 6" square ruler, and trimmed the block to size.   It seemed to me like this was important in Katie's quilt, so I was careful to duplicate this step.





Below is what the quilt looks like so far.  None of the blocks have been sewn together yet

Quilt in Progress

Here are the left over triangles ready for the next round.