Improvi-robin round three

I’ve just mailed on the latest round of the Improvi-robin. I was a bit late on it, but had warned the next person (my sister) that I would be late. She set up the rotation so I would send to her knowing I might be late once we got into garden season.

She also encouraged me to get wild with the project, which so far was sort of bland, despite the bright colors. No-one had done anything really improvisational. When I asked her if it was okay to chop things up this late in the series, she encouraged me to go wild. So I did.

I forgot to take a photo of the piece as received, so you’ll have to click over to flickr to see it. It’s nice and colorful, would make a fine pillow as is, but did not inspire me to add a border. I wanted to cut it up. My initial inspiration was circles – I would cut circles out of it and sew them onto a fresh background. And I ordered a circle cutter, but it didn’t arrive in time.

Once I settled in to work on it I decided circles weren’t going to work, and eventually settled on plan B – cut the piece in quarters, add set-in strips, rearrange. After selecting fabrics, I decided to do reciprical strips (cut both, swap pieces and sew). Here’s what I ended up with:

By then I was 4 days overdue on mailing the thing on, with my parents coming to visit in 2 days, so I decided to send the blocks on as is. My sister had suggested this earlier, that I do what I could and send on to her even if it was still in pieces.

When I went to sign the label, I read the card with it. It said something along the lines of “I love this block, but never did anything with it, I know you guys will help out.” Oops. Said block got chopped up. I hope she likes the end result better than the block that no longer exists.

Else it might be time to hitch a ride on one of my UFOs for an extended tour of the universe.