FREESTYLE STRINGS WORKSHOP

 I attended a two-day zoom workshop by Sherri Lynn Woods this weekend.  We started out at 8am on Saturday with a talk by Tara Faughnan about color and value, mostly value.  It was a great lecture with pictures of her quilts.  What struck me was when she said, she needed to 'unlearn' balance.  I need to unlearn balance too!  I have a tendency to want to place the colors evenly around the quilt.  I need to stop that, and be content with the tension that 'unbalanced' causes.

She talked about value and it's importance.  She makes areas of light values and dark values in her quilts.  She said, black and white are the extreme ends of value and with every color in between it's value depends on what color it's next to.

Here are a few of the quilts she made using strip sets.

After Tara's talk, Sherri started the workshop where we cut strips and sewed them together.  She suggested several ways to do it - planned, where you lay the strips out and decide what order you sew them together.  Spontaneous, where you pick a strip and then another and sew it to the first and then choose another from the pile and sew it on, choosing which would be next as you go.  Then there is randomly, where you put the strips into a bag and pull them out without looking and sew them together without editing.

I prefer planning as I go.  I don't think I could do the random way.  I like to have some say in it.

We sewed strip sets on Saturday until about noon, then there was an open sew afterward.

Sunday, Sherri talked about cutting the strip sets and sewing them back together.  I didn't get to that, I was just having fun sewing strips together.  Someday I'll get around to making a quilt from them.

I started by picking five colors that spoke to me that morning and jumped into it from there.  I cut some strips and then pulled some strips from the scrap bucket that worked with them.  I was surprised at how many strips were useable.  I was able to make use of some of the long, long strips that were excess backing cut-offs from after a quilted quilt is trimmed.  I mixed prints and solids.

Here is what I had at the end of the weekend.  I don't know where it will go from here.