SAQA Auction Donation Quilt

It's time once again to send in our 12 x 12" quilts for the annual SAQA auction which will take place later in the summer.  It's a fun thing to participate in-  the small works raise a bunch of money for SAQA and it gives me an opportunity to try out some small things.

This year I started my auction quilt while at the Jean Wells Keenan workshop.  It was the first time I'd pieced improvisationally, and it was quite freeing (and new) for me to not have to plan every single thing.  I was working on a larger piece which I hope to share sometime soon, and piles of little bits of fabric were accumulating near my sewing machine.  On the second to last day of the workshop, I decided to piece together a bunch of these little bits into a pleasing composition ~12 x 12".  It's a mixture of cotton, velour, polyester, silk etc. (always with me it's all kinds of things) but the main background fabrics are some sort of weird pseudo-suede in grey and light purple.  They gave a great soft texture to this piece and the larger piece in which I used them, but they melt/scorch worse than just about any fabrics I've ever worked with, so beware.

I was really proud of myself to use only the random scraps of things left over from the larger project!  I did a bit of hand stitching using perle cotton, and then quilted it on my machine when I got home. I'm one of those people who can't let abstract things stay abstract, and it looked to me a little bit like a tropical reef fish (with the nose pointing to the left and the fin pointing up), so I named it fish and bits.

Fish and Bits, 12 x 12", c. Shannon Conley, 2016

I'm not really a piecer or an improv-er, but that's why I wanted to take the Jean Wells class.  It was really wonderful and pushed me to work in a totally new way.  Have you taken any classes that were like that?  It's such a rewarding experience.