A New Project--Improv Alphabet

The last thing I need right now is to start a new quilting project, especially with the busy holiday season upon us, but that's exactly what I did recently. Our November guild meeting featured a presentation by Elaine Poplin of Huntsville, AL, who shared many quilts she has made, including her inspiration and design process. Here are photos of a couple of her beautiful quilts with amazing quilting on them. You also get to see Elaine in a great jacket made from a pattern she designed. See more at her website HERE. 

Elaine Poplin

The next day was our "Outspoken" workshop with Elaine, where we gathered to learn her methods for making scrappy improv letters. 

Be Strong by Elaine Poplin

Elaine had samples of a full set of letters, numbers, and symbols up on the wall for us to study. We started with an easy one, a capital "E", to learn the basics, then continued from there. Here's what I had completed by the end of the day.

Some people were making letters for specific phrases, but I decided to shoot for making the whole alphabet, and I might make numbers as well at the end. The blocks will get joined together into horizontal rows, and some will need background added to get them up to size, like that small "w" needs an addition at the top to make it tall enough. 

As you can see, I'm using bright colors on scrappy black and dark grey backgrounds. The colors for my letters made in the class were chosen randomly from the scraps I had brought with me. After I got home, I wrote out the whole alphabet and assigned a color to each letter in order to get a fairly even distribution of the colors. Getting ready for Thanksgiving limited my quilting time, but I was able to complete one short phrase that seems appropriate this week. 

I was able to spend most of Black Friday in the sewing room, and I am very thankful for that. Here's where I am on my alphabet after my marathon of scrappy stitching. I count 26 letters done, which means I'm halfway there!

I'm currently working my way through each color separately (i.e. making all the red letters at the same time before moving on to another color.) That approach seems to make the process a little more efficient. I'm having a great time digging through my bags and bins of scraps to find pieces that will work together. These orange letters are nearly done, just needing some background added around them, then I can move on to another color today.

I'm  linking up with:

Rainbow Scrap Challenge at So Scrappy

 Oh Scrap! at Quilting is more fun than Housework on Sunday. 

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA