Hello!

I’ve getting back into improv quilting and trying out some different shapes and ideas. One idea that’s been floating around in my head is the idea of doors. After happening upon a photo of an ornate door that was more of an arch shape, I started thinking about how I could interpret it in fabric.

I decided to grab some fabric and get started. I rummaged through my large scraps bin for pieces larger than 10″x10″. I chose 3 fabrics because I wanted a solid outline of the door in a different fabric to emphasize the shape. The other two fabrics were the door itself and the wall it is in. I used a couple different improv techniques before figuring out what I was doing. My first go at this was in different fabrics and I cut two right hand arcs because I wasn’t paying attention to the fact that I needed to cut in a different direction to get the left hand arc. Here is the result of my second try:

I did find that I needed to cut my starting squares/rectangles bigger because the upper left and right corners are cut off. I’d have to piece in a section at the top corners if I wanted to square it off. I also had two vastly different sized arcs when I was finished so using larger pieces of fabric would give me the opportunity to square up and potentially have similarly sized pieces. I also just realized looking at the picture that I could have cut down the height of the right arc to match the height of the left arc and they would have been closer in size. Still learning things.

I chose to try to line up the arc of the doors at the top to get more of a continuous curve. I could have also aligned the rectangles at the midpoint of the block and then the arcs of the doors wouldn’t have met but it also would give additional visual interest. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, it probably depends on what you’re going for. I think if I had used all solids you wouldn’t be able to tell as much where the seams are on the door, especially after it’s quilted.

I see many more doors and experiments in my future.

Happy creating!

Camille