Quiltcon Charity Challenge Update

Fabric bundles were mailed out last week to our members who are participating in the group improv for the national MQG Quiltcon 2016 Charity Challenge, and this week everyone received a set of guidelines for creating their block.

We are doing "improv with intent" which is a process wherein you set some guidelines, or limitations, to help achieve your desired result. The steps we are using for this are

1. Find inspiration. We are going to use images and memories of Florida sunsets.
2. Curate your fabrics. We have chosen to use five of the colors allowed by MQG for this challenge: off-white, sunflower, tomato red, light teal, and black.
3. Set limits. We are limiting our selves with our palette choices, and how we define our process. 
4. Define your patchwork process. We are going to outline a few parts of our process in order to lead ourselves in achieving a group result that makes a pleasing quilt.

We will all work individually to create a block from the same series of steps, but because we are not using a pattern, everyone's work will be different. The common factors - our inspiration of a Florida sunset, our color palette, and our patchwork process - will help to guide us all.

Our participants have been given some guiding steps to help them create their block, and we look forward to seeing everyone's progress in our Facebook Group or here on the blog. We are going to collect blocks at the November meeting, and work on putting the top together at the December Sewcial.

We are still looking for people to help assemble the top, construct the backing, baste, quilt and bind our quilt. We need to finish up by early January so that we can deliver our quilt to Pasadena for the Quiltcon exhibit.

I hope everyone has fun with this challenge!

Allison Schnackenberg
VP of Administration

Quiltcon 2016 Member Charity Challenge

Now is the time to sign up to help us make our group improv quilt.

“Improv is more than sewing together random bits of fabric. You can take an idea, an image, or an object and translate it into a block or quilt via improvisational piecing.” - Cheryl Arkinson

If you missed the meeting last Saturday, you will have missed my brief presentation about our plan for the Quiltcon Charity Challenge. We will be participating as a guild, and it's our task to put together a group improv quilt. We have recently seen some amazing work by our members who have thrown themselves into improv either individually, or as part of our Round Robin and Modern Traditional workshops. So this is going to be a piece of cake for us!

YOU CAN DO THIS.

The Challenge gives us a palette of up to six colors to work with: white, off-white, sunflower, tomato red, light teal, grey and black. Looking at the palette, if we eliminate the white and grey, we have a group of colors which to those of at the meeting, really were evocative of Florida. In particular, Florida sunsets.

Our inspiration, and our palette.

Now that we have this beautiful inspiration, and a color palette, we are half way there!

Improv with intent is about working with some guidelines to create something without a pattern. The steps could be defined as

1. Find inspiration.  (Done!)
2. Curate your fabrics. (Done for us!)
3. Set limits. (We are limiting ourselves to a palette of five colors, as a starting point.)
4. Define your patchwork process.

We are going to define our patchwork process by guiding ourselves with a series of steps. The steps will also form part of our limitation. We will all work individually to create a block from the same series of steps, but because we are not using a pattern, everyone's work will be different.  The common factors - our inspiration of a Florida sunset, our color palette, and our patchwork process - will help to guide us all.

As an example, our first steps will be

• Yellow fabric - cut out a four sided shape, with one side being at least five inches long.
• Red and yellow fabric - cut out a variety of four sided shapes ranging in size from one to three inches tall. Assemble the shapes into two larger four sided blocks.

... and so on.

Every single member of our guild is capable of participating in this, and I sincerely hope that you all decide to participate. You will have plenty of support, and no judgement. Think of it as a special BOM. 

SFMQG will provide any member who wants to participate with a bundle of solid fabrics in the palette we are working with. The guild will pay for the fabrics. We will be asking everyone to complete one block by the beginning of December. We will then assemble the blocks into a quilt top, and then a fully finished quilt.

If you would like to participate, please check your inbox for a message from SFMQG and respond to that to sign up. Then watch your inbox for further instructions.

WE CAN DO THIS.

This is going to be so much fun!

Thank you!
Allison