improvising, DS-style

My partner for the Urban Home Goods swap on flickr really made things easy on me.  She put "wall hanging" first on her list (with an exclamation point!) and loves Denyse Schmidt as well as charcoal, yellow, orange, and aqua together.  That combination really sort of spoke to me (and I already owned three of those colors...though who can resist a few extra Kona solids?), so I was off and sewing.


















I actually own Denyse Schmidt Quilts, and while I have long enjoyed browsing the photos, I realized I had never really looked at the patterns very carefully.  Talk about picky!  So many pattern pieces!  I was kind of looking forward to improvising, wonkiness, and etc., so I ended up going in a different direction.  The "pattern" I ended up using was inspired by the beautiful DS Run & Fall...the description talks about the complicated pattern and math that goes into achieving a random look, so I guess I was kind of wrong about the improvisation process.

I'm more of a rotary-cutter person, so I went that route, a la wonky log cabin/Gwen Marston slicing (even without a ruler sometimes!).  I think the idea comes across pretty well, though there is a certain something about the shapes of the pieces in the DS quilt that I'm missing, I think--maybe that's what the pattern pieces are for!  I wish, too, that the scale was a little different....I think narrower rows with two charcoal strips might have looked better. 

On the up side, she was certainly right about that color combo!  I had originally planned to use two different oranges, but in person, they were almost the same...so one orange it was--still, though, it's a good mix.  Can you spot that one yellow-and-white poka dot piece?  Using a little bit of print with mostly solids seemed kind of DSish, and it's also a nod (along with the bigger stripes of dots on the back)


















 to the dots my partner loves (sorry they're not red!).  The binding is charcoal (though it looks almost royal blue in the photo of the back...not sure what's going on there).
 
The quilting was fun.  I scoured flickr for inspiration, as most of DS's work seems to be hand quilted...something I'd like to try but wasn't ready to do for the first time on someone else's project.  This is kind of what I was after, though there's no part of me that's ready to quilt leaves!















My partner also mentioned magnets, and somehow I thought of this project...it was fun to look through my photos for favorite shots of fabric.
















All packed up with some Lemonheads (the factory is right next to my hometown, but these were made in Canada?) and off to New Jersey, an hour before the last FedEx pickup.  Whew! 

Next up, the sheets (for real this time!), then some shots of the beautiful things my partner made for me.

Happy weekend!