I've been lucky enough to participate in The Traveling Quilts bee/round-robin, which is a year-long quilting adventure where each participant starts a quilt then sends it along to the next person (and then the next, and the next after that, etc.) to work on. The last person to get each quilt will finish it for the original quilter.
Unlike a conventional bee or round-robin, where everyone makes roughly the same kind of thing or the same kind of shape, this bee is completely open-ended. Participants are simply inspired by what they get and add stuff accordingly. It is A LOT of fun!
You can see my earlier posts about The Traveling Quilts here, here, and here.
This time, I had Ashley's quilt. When I got it from Alissa, it looked like this. Here are some photos of the earlier evolution of this quilt with Ashley, John, and Amber.
(If you look at all those photos, you'll quickly realize that I probably added way too much stuff, which is a problem I've had with every quilt I've worked on for this bee. I am apparently a total quilt hog!)
I was drawn to the way Alissa added negative space to the quilt - especially the skinny frames of gray and off-white. I wanted to continue the negative space and the frame concept, but the focus of this quilt is the improv piecing, so I obviously wanted to continue that too.
I feel like I've been using pod shapes a lot lately but, at the risk of seeming like a one-way monkey, I decided to do it here too. I decided to use dark pods in the light negative space and light pods in the dark negative space.
As I was working on this, I thought a lot about how much I love Rossie's Kelp Quilt with its long skinny strings of piecing.
I also tried to create some depth by putting improv vignettes inside the pods and also in the negative space.
And here's where it ended up. I realized too late that I had oriented the piece Alissa sent me differently than she had intended. (I'm sorry, Alissa!) but I'm sure this would look fine rotated in any direction.
Here's a closer look at the part I added to the right side.
And here's a closer look at the part I added to the top. This is my favorite part of what I added!
I hope you like it, Ashley! I had a lot of fun working on it. Can't wait to see what the next quilters do to it!
