This class with Gwen was just amazing. I've never felt so free with piecing as when doing this class. First off we had a nice discussion about the quilts that Gwen brought. What a treat to see them up close. This post will be just about those close ups, more on the class in later posts. I plan to show a little bit every day as I was a very good blogger for this class and have lots of photos!
This quilt is a stunner. Very bold and there are so many design elements when you look closely. I can't seem to move my photos around in the post so see below for closeups.
Gwen started to do these gentle pieced curves after staying with Jean Wells a few years ago. They make a nice occasional design element in a quilt that otherwise has straight lines.
Getting back to this one, notice where she got tired of making the triangles and so continued with the solid red. She did hand quilt in some triangles in that space- neat trick.
This quilt was all free hand quilted- no lines. I love those swirls at the top.
The skinny inserts were another trick that Gwen learned from Jean. I'd done them before, but did even more of them in this class. A skinny strip of something like that red just really makes the block sing.
Love that tapered insert too!
Sometimes you might want to put in a long border strip, but don't have anything long enough. Take that as a nice opportunity to piece in a bit of a contrasting color. This will make it way more interesting. You can also deliberately use a color that's close, but not quite the same. That also makes the quilt more interesting. You'll see that technique in several of the photos up above.
This last one is a quilt that I really admired in the Abstract Quilts in Solids book (as all these quilts are from), but I couldn't tell if it had any quilting in it. As it turns out, it is only tied with these bits of silk thread. It's very textural and serene. More soon!