Processing my Ice Road Quilt

After 10 months of thinking about it, my Ice Road quilt finally happened. There was a show deadline looming, so I decided to get a move on and finally create a quilt to commemorate my amazing teaching trip to Canada's arctic town of Inuvik last March.  If you check that post, you'll see the pillow top that I created over that weekend to illustrate another design option for my Improv Under the Influence piecing technique.  That pillow top was the spark for this quilt.

Last year I purchased a FQ box of DS Modern Solids. I've been savouring that box on my shelf but decided to go ahead and create my quilt entirely from those gorgeous fabrics.  I initially thought that I would make 9 blocks similar to that X pillow top, sew them together with skinny white sashing and border the whole works with a 10" or 12" border of white.

As I created the triangle units other ideas popped into my head, so I held off on piecing them together until I could play on my design wall a bit. These are average night time cell phone photos, but you get the idea.

Working the the idea of "road", I tried a linear layout.  This wasn't dynamic enough. All of the joining seams are vertical so there's a lack of movement and interest. I wasn't happy with the lack of oomph (highly technical quilting term, aka "visual dynamics").

What about diagonal? I like the fun angles created at the mitred (45 degree) corners of these improv-pieced units. I played with this in my Light of May quilt.  Unfortunately B and I agreed this had a rocket-ship appearance that wasn't what I was going for.

I returned to the vertical layout, but starting filling in space with solid coloured triangles. Now we're getting somewhere, but for my eye, things were still a little haphazard.

I spent quite some time over a few days daydreaming about what I like and where my work tends to go. I think I can safely say that I enjoy the improv construction a great deal. I also seem to enjoy taming the wonkiness of improv and fitting pieces into structural layouts. Perhaps this comes from my scientific background, or my traditional quilting beginning? I don't really know, but I can say that I'm very pleased with the final outcome. Not to mention, happy that all of those triangles fit together without any math works! They were all cut from chunks of pieced border units using my giant 20 1/2" square ruler on point.

Getting closer!

I know some people thrive on the haphazard (and I thoroughly enjoy so many of those quilts!). Perhaps I am slowly working my way there, but in the mean time, this is my process and this is my quilt.

Ice Road, 2016

I quilted it on my new Juki 2010. Some of it was done with the walking foot, but when the noise got to be too much, I took it off and went with the regular sewing foot. I cannot really tell the difference in quilting quality - there was some pulling and puckering with both feet (spray and pin basted!). I stabilized the straight white sashings first with stitch in the ditch and I purposely did not cross the sashing with any quilting in order to maintain as straight lines as possible and avoid any pulling.  All of the quilting is unmarked, improv straight lines. I follow seams and make turns where I feel like it!

There are more close ups of the quilting, if you click on any of the photos you'll end up on my Flickr stream where you can see more.

I'll let you know if it makes it into the show!