Bias Petal Score....My process

Last winter, I volunteered to be a tester for Sherri Lynn Wood's upcoming book, The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters. I enjoyed my experienced immensely...except for the fact that I couldn't share my process with you, along the way. But good news....I am free to do so now. Rest assured I took plenty of pictures along the way.

To quote the book description on Amazon; "Instead of traditional instructions, she (Sherri Lynn Wood) presents 10 frameworks (or scores) that create a guiding, but not limiting, structure." All of the testers received one of the 10 scores.

When I received the "Bias Petal" score....a little panic ensued. Why you might ask? Well, did the improv part unnerve me? No, not in the least...I have been having my own love affair with improv for some time now. What about the curved piecing or bias strips?? No, not really, curved piecing and I are old friends. What was it then?? The word PETAL....yes, the word PETAL!! Nothing personal...but, but, but I don't do flowery petal type things!!!! Yup....that knocked me right out of my comfort zone....probably a good thing.

 Here is the finished quilt: Shifting Impressions

I needed several bias strips and as usual got a little carried away

Then I cut meters upon meters of bias strips (after all, I wanted variety). I still have plenty of those strips sitting around for more projects.

Whenever working with anything on the bias.....bubbles and puckers can be a problem.But, Sherri Lynn has plenty of little tips to combat those pesky bubbles. My secret weapon is spray starch!!!!

I made several petals....and just kept putting them up on my black design wall. I used several gradient type fabrics and mostly solids or tone on tone fabrics.

I decided to shatter the petals.....somewhere along the process, I stopped thinking of them as petals. I shattered them by slicing through the petals (using my rotary cutter) and shifting them a little and sewing them back together.

 The back of a shattered petal.

The shattering......created a different effect.

I took one look at the wall and the question that kept running through my head was.....how in the world am I going to put this all together into one piece???  I was determined to do it all by machine.....no hand sewing whatsoever.

As you can see, I started quilting sections, with no idea where this was going. And of course I threw in a little QAYG (Quilt as you Go).....and there you have it.

The exciting part of working this way is that the ideas sort of start exploding along the way.