Improv sky

For the last few months, the St. Louis MQG has been working on their entry for the guild QuiltCon charity quilt. The theme for this year is playing with scale, and the MQG specified this rather interesting color palette.

A core group of us met to discuss how we wanted to interpret the theme and decided on a large but partial view of St. Louis's Gateway Arch based on a photograph by a local photographer (from whom we obtained permission). We decided to improv piece the quilt so we could easily divide up the blocks among lots of members who wanted to help. Since I work at a fabric store, I offered to curate most of the fabrics needed for the quilt.

We also received some contributions from guild members, and I was joined one night by another member to cut up all the fabrics and assemble them into bags that coordinated with the parts of the picture in each quilt block.

Members worked on their blocks at our local retreat in October, as well as on their own, and we collected the bulk of the blocks at our November meeting. Our member Dottie, who's serving as the Project Manager for the quilt and will be quilting it, began to lay them out on her design wall at home. Pretty cool, huh??

(Two photos above borrowed from Dottie's Instagram. Thanks, Dottie!)

I managed to finish up my blocks in the week or so before the meeting. I don't do a lot of improv, but as seems to happen every time I do, I really enjoyed the process of making the blocks, and after finishing them, thought to myself how I really need to do more. Maybe this time I will. I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time in my schedule to work on the blocks, so I chose three blocks from the sky portion, which was a bit easier than the arch. You can see my blocks in the top left corner in Dottie's pictures above.

I am so excited to see the rest of this quilt come together. It's been great to see so many guild members involved in its creation, and I'll be really happy to see a quilt at QuiltCon that I had a hand in, especially since I wasn't able to finish some of my own quilts that I was hoping to submit this year.