Veering off the Pretty Road

This was a challenging one. The robin who sends to me is my sister, Abby, and it turns out we shared the same opinion of this particular WIP at the stage that Abby received it in April: “Oooh, so pretty!”

Jackie’s original block was a stunner, and Miki and Willa had added to it nicely (pics grabbed from the Flickr group for your viewing pleasure):

The thing is, Abby likes to leap around “outside the box” and I suspect other robins may have felt the starting block was too lovely to mess with, which is completely understandable — and acceptable. The “rules” of the Improvi-Robin are “anything goes,” and if that means taking a pretty WIP and heading on down Pretty Road with it, that’s fine.

The next person can either head further on down that road, or set off cross-country to a destination unknown.

Abby emailed me to say that she felt the urge to cut up the WIP and take it in a new dirction, but was concerned that those who had gone before her might feel she’d ruined their careful work. I encouraged her to whack away. The whole point of this collaborative project is to have fun, explore, play, and create something unexpected (and hopefully wonderful, but unexpected is more important, IMO). Besides, I reminded her, another I-R rule is “no complaining if you don’t like what someone does with your block!”

Here’s what happened after some slice-and sew on Abby’s part:

Some of you may cringe and wince, but just scroll on back up to the top picture there, and remind yourself that it all turned out okay.

Ordinarily, whoever slices up a WIP would sew it back up into some kind of unified piece before sending it on, but at this point Mum & Dad were about to descend on Abby for a visit, and rather than postpone this round for a couple of weeks I told her to just send me the blocks at whatever stage they were at and I’d do something with them.

What that something was going to be, I had no idea. Of all the I-R WIPs so far, this one sat on the design wall the longest before inspiration struck. But strike it did, when I realized that this party was on the edge of out of control. So I isolated the rabble-rousers (by setting aside the four blocks in the top row in the picture just above) and turned the others around for a time out, with what had originally been the inside corners now facing out:

I calmed these down by adding some cool, pale batiks to what had originally been the outside corners (now in the center). It would have been faster and easier to just trim each ragged edge straight, but I liked the wonky-step effect and decided to keep it. Adding to each side involved ripping out the last couple inches of a whole lot of seams, and then sewing them up again, but it was worth it:

Then I did the same thing to what had originally been the inside corners, and added an orange strip to what were now the outside edges:

Some strips of a wild Kaffe Fassett Stripe, and a fussy-cut center and I’m not sure we’re exactly back on Pretty Road…

looks more like Wild Thing Way to me… but wherever it is, I like it! I’d had in mind cutting up the other blocks and making some kind of border out of them, but at this point felt my turn was done, so I packed those up with this and sent them to Jackie. I look forward to seeing how she’s going to finish this one.

The June IR round is going to see each of us receiving our original blocks back in some wonderful, possibly unrecognizeable, state, for whatever we think should happen next. Maybe some will go straight to backing and quilting. Others might want to expand on what’s been done. I think we’re going to need more than a month for this stage, but a deadline for showing off our finished Robin quilts feels necessary, so we’ll huddle up and see what works for the group.

And at some point after that (Sept., maybe?), I’ll be ready to do this again. If you’d like to be part of Improvi-Robin Season 2, take a look at our guidelines, here, then let me know in the comments or send me an email at Stephanie {at} VenusdeHilo {dot} com.

Tagged as: improvisational piecing