The imagination quietly waits for an invitation. Engaging a process and setting aside a pattern is one way to invite the imagination to explore. Making a quilt piece by piece, sewing one thing to another and allowing the quilt to change as it grows is exciting from start to finish. Most of us learned to quilt by following instructions and patterns. Many of us enjoy taking that knowledge and improvising.
Study with Gwen Marston opened my mind and liberated my practices. Gwen published Liberated Quiltmaking in 1996 and Liberated Quiltmaking II in 2010. Many of us called her our mentor and friend.
My quilts are machine pieced and quilted by hand. I approach hand quilting in a liberated fashion too, favoring free form lines and varied texture - sometimes sparse, sometimes dense. Each stitch by hand is a tiny hand made mark in cloth, holding things together by a thread.
Making a small quilt to work out ideas is a practice serving as an artist's study or sketch. Intending to make a small quilt requires little investment and invites experimentation.
Quilts and art are about what you bring to the process.
In Jazz, improvisation makes music. In the sewing room, improvisation makes free style quilts through a process of discovery. It is all very liberating.
