Silk Shibori
One of the things that I love about my job at C&T is that I work with many different authors who have developed many different and interesting quilting techniques.
One of the authors that I work with is Ruth McDowell. If you’re familiar with her work, you know that she does amazing pieced quilts, often using nature as her inspiration. I really like her techniques—I teach a class called Piecing Ruth McDowell Style using her book, Ruth B. McDowell’s Piecing Workshop.
I also like to dye fabric (I’ve written a book called Fast, Fun & Easy ® Fabric Dyeing). This summer I spent some time dyeing silk fabric using a Shibori technique I learned in a class with Jan Myers-Newbury. As I started putting pieces of dyed fabric up on the design wall, I realized that I couldn’t get the look I wanted if the edges of the pieces were all neatly lined up. I started over and didn’t worry about how it might get sewn together. I just arranged the fabric the way I wanted it to look.
As I looked at what was up on the wall, I realized that I had all the skills I needed to sew the quilt together, and that I learned them from Ruth. To get the quilt top together, I would need to do inset corners and partial seam construction. These are things that I demonstrate all the time to my students, so no problem.
I started piecing, and in the process, I realized that the excess fabric that I was cutting off could probably be incorporated back into the quilt. I decided to get the pieces that I already had on the wall put together, and then I’d go back and see if I wanted to incorporate any of the cut-offs. To get those additional pieces into the quilt, I would have to do inset squares. Again, this is something that I demonstrate all the time in the piecing class. It was a little scary to cut holes in the middle of a quilt that I had just pieced together, but with careful measuring, cutting, and sewing, everything worked out perfectly.
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One Comment
Lynn, this is exactly how I work. I start throwing things at the wall and see how they go together. Some parts of the piece might be seamed, others, raw-edged because I don’t want to lose a particular edge; and I’ve even started – gasp — fusing other pieces on.
I’m scheduled to take a workshop with Jan Myers-Newbury in Nov. Can’t wait!