Thursday, May 22, 2014

Liberty Blocks

There are other words to name the blocks that take creative license, like Wonky or Crumb quilts. They are not as easy to make as it would seem because they fly in the face of conventional quilting.

To be in a creative flow is, in part, altering my mood, boggling my mind and being spontaneous. It goes against most things I was taught, even in quilting. Its like making a mistake on purpose even though its not a mistake.

My 6" swap partner sent these two blocks this month, along with a splash of hand-dyed fabric from Australia.

This style pushes a person to a space where they stop resisting and stop trying to control the creative flow. 

I am exploring this concept in quilting and decided to go with it and use two of my swaps (6" and 12") over the next year to make a wonky holiday quilt. Its going to take me some time to gather up the pieces to it and then make sense of how to assemble them all. Sometimes it feels that my creativity is the clutches of my ego, and that I find myself surrendering more and more to the spontaneous moment. That is harder than you might think for me. In that moment, I am less self-critical especially with these blocks because there is no wrong way to do them. I plan to use the 12" blocks for the center and the 6" blocks for one of the borders.