I can remember when I started creating quilts with curved cuts. I was nervous and intensely focused, afraid the pieces sewn together would not lay flat. Now, many years and many quilts later, I create almost all my art quilts with curved piecing. Straight lines are unusual for me.
I decided to make an Ocean Colors quilt and had a table full of beautiful blue fabrics, batiks, prints, some tone on tone fabrics. I decided to make an ocean colors quilt for my Etsy shop, something fun, without preconceived design ideas, just letting the colors guide me. I wasn’t even looking at previous quilts similar to this one. I knew only that i wanted lighter colors at the top working down to darker colors at the bottom. The Ocean Colors 2 quilt shown here was the result. I stayed in the blues for color with some leaning towards turquoise. Sometimes I’ve used more blue greens in the lighter parts but not in this one. I started at the top of the quilt and made a curved cut from two pieces overlapped, then sewed them together and moved to the next piece. It was design in process with no sketch and no limitations except the width, mostly determined by the length of some of my fabric pieces. As you can imagine, I have MANY MANY fabric pieces in my studio and MANY MANY bins of fabric. This quilt was made mostly from these scrap pieces, sorted into colors, just waiting for a project. What fun!!
I’ve been wanting to try my hand at curved piecing but couldn’t come up with a design idea that clicked in my brain for a first attempt. This idea appeals to me. It’s close in terms of the no rules approach I’ve used in crazy/crumb/string piecing. I think that I’ll go look through my stash and see if I can settle on a color range. I’m very partial to greens although I’m constantly surprised at how many blues I have as I don’t consider myself a fan of blues, lol! Thank you for the impetus to get started.
I often find myself combining colors I wouldn’t normally think to put together so be adventurous!