ARTISUN: Liberated Quiltmaking

This first quilt was made by senior Amy Hsu, and was one of my favs. Really well balanced with great contrast, and strong bordering.

I posted the other night about my Liberated Quilt that I made for our retiring secretary Kay. Well these are the pieces that my Intermediate 3-D kids made with me.

First we started with a lottery of about 50 bags of donated fabrics that I had pre-washed and organized into color schemes. I only had 7 students in this class so they really had a lot of bags to choose from. After they selected their bags I asked them to pull out any fabrics that they didn't like or didn't feel flowed visually with the others. Then they were allowed to find additional fabrics from other donated bins, again, that they felt worked with the existing bag. The last step was to sort all the fabrics from lights to darks to make sure they had a good value range to choose from for contrast.

Keep in mind that this is the first time these kids have used a sewing machine, so we spent 5 days learning how to use them, and in the process they produced one star, one piece of striped piecing of about 10 different fabrics from their bags, and two flying geese that they sewed together. No patterns were used, we just eye-balled the sizes and free-form cut, thus a highly liberated technique. This takes the pressure off the kids so that they can go way faster, and not feel that everything needs to line up perfectly.

This next quilt was done by senior Ashley Chowdhury, and if you knew Ashley you'd say that these fabrics are sooo Ashley :) This colorway (bag) is also the one my own daughter would have picked out. These are the colors we decorated her dorm room in last school year.

I loved Ashley's label that I made each of the kids put on the backside of their quilts. They also had to show me that they could do a bit of needle-turn applique. Ashley did it with her sweet little heart.

These next two pieces came from very similar bags, but the designs couldn't have been more different which is something I stress in all my classes, originality!

The top one was done by junior Josh Berger, the young man who redesigned my blog. I think it was brilliant of him to put in the black and white flying geese to border his star. Really wonderful piece Josh!

This next one by senior Tiffany Lee really draws the eye with all the fun bugs crawling around. And then I love how she fringed the edge of her label fabric to add texture to the backside.

Now we have a very soft, feminine quilt by senior Angela Wan. And if you know Angela, again this bag she picked is so her. But then notice those 4 bits of the brighter yellow that bring strength to the piece, making a bolder statement. That's Angela, quiet, reserved but with a strong, smart inner core. Love ya kiddo.

Senior Lauren DeBalen gives us this very rich feeling work, with great contrast to really show off her design.

And then we have senior Julia Faith Chanco who pleaded with me and talked me into letting her do a full twin size bed quilt (the kids had a minimum and maximum size to work to, but young Julia is very persuasive LOL)

It was so big in fact, that it took 3 of us 2 hours after school on the floor to pin baste the thing together. Julia talked her boyfriend, senior Andre' Martin into helping out :) We had so much fun crawling on the floor together, taking pix, and gossiping about all the other seniors.