By Diane Harris, HQ Stitch Brand Ambassador

Last week I spent a few days in Kansas for the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival in Overland Park. These days I take classes for just two reasons.

  • To observe the approach of a well-known teacher
  • To get inside an artist’s head

I no longer take classes for something I could learn out of a book, or to make a quilt design for which I could just follow a purchased pattern. This is a good strategy for me.

Tia Curtis and her sons at Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival

We’ve been talking about improvisation here recently* so it won’t come as a surprise that I took two classes on the same. The first was with Tia Curtis from Leavenworth, Kansas.

Tia is a longarm quilter and improv maker who belongs to the Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild. Her two sons helped with show and tell. It was kind of fun to observe them trying their best to do a good job for their mom.

She shared several of her improvisational quilts, and that was a good way to set the stage. It was readily apparent that you just make it up as you go along.

I could see that having fun was part of the process and that taking this too seriously might cancel out the joy that should be part of it.

The quilts featured stars, log cabins, churn dash and shoofly blocks, birds and baskets.

There was a generous helping of improvisational curves, too.

Then the curves were combined with points, and I was excited to hear that we’d learn this technique.

I made a few log cabins,

and a shoofly,

and a wonky star. Tia brought scraps to share so I grabbed some swans and fussy cut them for this little gem.

It’s not really improvisational but I didn’t care. Toward the end of the day we learned Tia’s method for improv curves (much like mine) and then the kicker was the New York Beauty-type points.

My neighbor made this block and isn’t it amazing? Her next step would be to set it inside another gray piece with an improvised curved seam, and from there she could square up the block.

Now that I’m home, I’ll pull out the blocks and see where I want to go next. I’ll keep you posted!

*If you missed it earlier, check out how to make a wonky star.