Improvisational Piecing

Today I finished the baby quilt I need for a baby shower on Saturday. It's a drive-by shower, then the mom-to-be will open gifts during a Zoom meeting. Oh, Covid, how you've changed things!

Everyone's life has been pretty stressful this year, and mine is no exception. All the piecing I've been doing lately has been pretty easy, so I decided I needed to challenge my brain a bit, and do some improvisational piecing. It was a 180 on what I had planned to do for this baby quilt, but the mood struck, and I went with it!

This is the backing for the baby quilt I finished today. I cut up a fat quarter to make the backing wider than WOF, but besides that the forest print was my inspiration. In case you are wondering, the print is from the Paintbrush Studios Forest Fables line. That whole line of fabrics is adorable!

I had originally planned to piece forest animals from a  couple different Elizabeth Hartmann patterns, but I've moved so much in my studio I misplaced both patterns, and I think it was serendipity! Rather  than looking for the patterns, I got an urge to do some improv piecing, and just fake my way through the whole quilt. I went ahead and ordered the fat quarters that go with this line, as well as a bit of yardage from the line I had planned to use as a border then ultimately decided against. 

One of the fat quarters had some animals I could fussy cut, so I started there.  Once I cut the animals to whatever size they would work best, I started designing them houses. 

A squirrel in a triangular treehouse? OK

How about some hedgehogs in a toadstool house?

The forest was starting to take shape, aside from the giant tree I wanted in the center. 

When I made the rabbit family tree, I added a woodpile with a sleeping deer on a whim.  You can see that by this time I was also working on the big tree with a tree house.

I had originally though to make a ladder going up the tree, then I thought the deer couldn't climb the ladder, it should be stairs. Yeah, none of this was realistic in the least, but I decided in my stressed out brain that it should be stairs. Not only that, it should be a spiral staircase. 

And if I was going to build a spiral staircase, the tree house needs to be multiple levels, yeah, that seems like a good idea. 

I got to this point, and I wasn't happy that the quilt was wider than it was tall. I make a lot of square baby quilts since nowadays they are more often used for tummy time than to ever be in a crib. Time to audition the border fabric.

Don't get me wrong, the border fabric is adorable, but to me, it didn't add to the quilt, it took away from it. No worries, I'll use it on another quilt. I still need to add to the height. I only had a fat quarter of the fabric I used for the ground, so adding to that wasn't going to happen. I didn't have much of the green tree fabric left either (even though I had purchased a whole 25 yard bolt of it a few years ago). I did some poverty piecing of the green, and I managed to add a decent amount to the top of the quilt. 

I know nothing about perspective, but somehow, adding more green to the big tree brought it closer to the foreground, and I really prefer this version. So here is my improvisational quilt top. I didn't plan anything out, no graph paper, no EQ, nothing, just built the forest scene in chunks then had to figure out how to connect the chunks together. I won't lie, there was plenty of ripping during the making of this, I wasn't always lining things up right, and I changed my mind along the way a couple times. 

I finished the quilt top yesterday, quilted and bound it today, so here it is finished!

The quilting is some FMQ leaves in an allover design.

I started this quilt on Saturday, and finished it on Thursday! I'll get it wrapped tomorrow, and my gift for Saturday will be ready. Then maybe tomorrow I can make a pillow sham I need to gift on Sunday...

So, do you ever do improv piecing? I find it more creative, but it takes more brain power. I spent long days sewing to get this done in such a short period of time. I did, however, get quite a bit of exercise. I was pretty much cutting two pieces in the cutting room, walking to my sewing room and sewing one seam. Going to the ironing board to press the one seam, then back to the cutting room to cut the next piece. I cut a lot of pieces oversized, then trimmed them down when I decided what I actually wanted to do. It is a messy and inefficient way to work, but it was a nice change too.