Thursday, April 20

 

 

 

Pat Sloan applique - improv flower petals
 sampler quilt on display at her
Trash Bag Quilts workshop
 

 

I drove over to Ruston yesterday to be a part of Pat Sloan's "Trash Bag Quilts" workshop.  This workshop is totally about making yardage out of scraps and reusing that yardage in a quilt project.  This workshop is totally about improvisational quilt-making......I loved every minute of it. 

She put me in a comfort zone when I spotted this improvisational use of fabric in one of her quilt blocks.  A stripe with a stripe!  Yikes.

 

While not all of the workshop was new to me, I learned so much from Pat Sloan.    Pat is an experienced teacher and loves what she does.  Very warm and personable and the improv style of the workshop just put me on top of the world.  I learned how she makes great sashing and borders for her quilts and how she makes curves the easy way!!!!  

 
 
 



Pat demonstrated how she  cuts wedges to tilt her quilt blocks to get them off-center when the quilt design calls for that little bit of an edge. 




























And, don't you just love the sampler column quilt.  I do too.  Pat calls it her calendar quilt, very simply because she worked on it every calendar day for a year.  Adding a strip or a bit of applique or other embellishment every day in the year of its origin  That, of course, is dragging out the  agony of 'getting it done', but is definitely  an example of patience and tenacity. 

Oh, and a highlight of the day.....how she patched and pieced, sliced and diced to make a lot of her own striped fabric.  Oh, what fun seeing her stripes in her sample quilts. 

I especially enjoyed how Pat made fabric for this large scale floral quilt.  She patched and pieced both the background and the flower petals.  No....it's not applique !  Each petal is curved pieced into the quilt.  Not for the improv feint of heart! 




Improv pieced large scale floral sampler by quilter maker
 fabric designer
 author of books:
Pat Sloan

Yes, I drove over to Ruston yesterday and would do it again in a heartbeat if I knew Pat Sloan would be at the other end of the drive.  A fun day filled with sunshine. 


And while at the computer this morning, the urge to play with loose ends just hit me.  I took a picture of one of Pat's quilts to photoshop and made a frame out of it......Let the fun never end.  Be improv ~