Monica Curry Quilt Design

One of my favourite piecing techniques is Improv. I come from a fine arts and design background so I love to go off the beaten path. I enjoy the freedom Improv provides. I believe it's quilting for the soul. There are no real rules for Improv quilting. You are basically piecing scraps together in a free-form way. The results are stunning. The textures and all the combined colours can result in a true work of art. My piece Summer Aspen below was submitted for a new wing at a local hospital. The theme for the submissions was trees. I chose the Aspen tree because I love how Aspen leaves rustle in the wind. Unfortunately, the piece wasn't chosen but I ended up with a very nice quilt for my home. SUMMER ASPEN by Monica Curry The strips I used for the tree trunks in  Summer Aspen  were cut from fabric that was printed from a  linocut  I made. I wanted each strip to look like an actual Aspen tree. I liked how this quilt turned out and it hung in my office...

This quilt, Happy Hour , was created for the Manitoba Crafts Council 2013 annual members' For the Love of Craft art show. I enjoyed making this art quilt. It was inspired by Rayna Gillman's book Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts . I named it Happy Hour because the polka-dots reminded me of Leonard Cohen's song Closing Time. There's a line in the song that goes "and the men they dance on the polka-dots." I was humming that tune much of the time I was finishing up the quilt, and I couldn't get that line out of my head. One of the most enjoyable things about free-form quilting is that it keeps you thinking outside the box. There's no real plan, which means all kinds of cool things can happen.

I made a sewing machine cover with an old art quilt that hung in our office. I had been trying out improv aka free form quilting for the first time and created this mini quilt Summer Aspen . I love the colours but grew tired of it on the wall. I used Rayna Gillman's book Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts to make this quilt art. This book guides you along very well and has beautiful examples of some of Ryana's pieces. At first, I thought it might look nice as a bag, but I changed my mind about that and decided to turn it into a sewing machine cover. I love how it turned out.