Forty Minutes of Play

This weekend contained a lot of quilty fun and inspiration.  Despite the craziness of family life and obligations, I was able to attend two major guild events: a talk by Victoria Findlay Wolfe on Friday night and a meeting on Saturday afternoon learning about embroidery on quilts and show and tell.  

I was not very familiar with Victoria's work but I definitely knew that she "won QuiltCon" and I believed her modern take on the double wedding ring was very deserving.  These are the takeaways I came from her presentation:

• All of the quilts she showed and talked about were not "planned" or sketched from the beginning- her process is very improvisational and she allows herself to think on things a while, change her plans, and let the design evolve.  
• All of us have a lot of fabric.  Why are we so afraid to cut it up a little and experiment?  There's always more fabric to be had.
• Try something new with every quilt that you make.
• If you are only comfortable following patterns, change a pattern a bit to make it your own. 

Her approach of doing "15 minutes of play"  is to simply make fabric out of scraps by sewing in an improvisational manner.  I attempted to do this last night with scraps from my City Sampler and this is the result:

I would have to say that this looks more like a scrappy "slab" ala Sunday Morning Quilts but I am happy with it. It took about 45 minutes to sew this together - I can't say that 15 minutes is enough time to accomplish a lot.

Seeing Victoria's beautiful and unique quilts made me think about my stash.  She seems to have no problem using fabrics with lots of colors in them.  Finding these types of fabrics in my stash is not so easy but here's a small sampling of what I could find:

My stash is primarily made up of novelty fabrics and monochromatic blenders.  Even though my stash is a colossal mess right now, picking out these fabrics took no time at all: 

I love the look of Victoria's work and I think she's on the same wavelength of two of my other favorite quilters: Sarah Fielke and Kathy Doughty.  I would like to challenge myself to think outside the box more and make a quilt with no pattern as well as use more fabrics with more color.  This will be one of my goals for 2014.