Scraptastic Midnight Meadow Quilt

Recently I’ve been teaching an evening class based on my Improv Meadow Quilt below. So of course I’ve been making another quilt alongside the students, but this time with a dark background.

The first 5 sessions were all about using different improv techniques to create flowers, leaves and stems.

And here’s what I imaginatively call my ‘wedge flower’ with added yo-yo. These are a great way to use up scraps, though I have been into my stash for the dark backgrounds.

Here’s a second scrappy wedge flower, this one with an appliqued centre.

And then we had a week making these freehand foundation pieced quarter circles that are based on this tutorial. I got a bit carried away and made 3! 

There’s also an improv Dresden quarter, a porthole and a scrappy improv flower in the photo above (as well as a mistake NYB piece from a recent quilt that I later rejected) and I’ve started to jigsaw piece them together…

This is how far I’ve got. It’s a bit bigger than the first one at 54in wide, rather than 43in, and I still plan to take the background upwards as in the original. Plus I’ll be adding in some more EPP flowers and hand appliqued stems and leaves, but I am still rationing my hand work (because of my ‘poor paw’ which is thankfully much improved) so that will have to wait for a bit.

I’ve graded the dark backgrounds from greys, through charcoals to black. The idea is that there’s moonlight shining down on the left hand side. So the question is should I call this ‘Midnight Meadow’ or ‘Moonlit Meadow’, what do you think?

We have two sessions left on the course and my students are also at the ‘jigsaw piecing’ part, so we are using a lot of the Design Grid Flannel in the studio at the moment. I can’t wait to share their amazing work – they have all been so creative!

I am linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday today (even though it’s actually Wednesday, apparently that’s still allowed!) for the second time this year!