In all my years of teaching I have never screwed up what class I was teaching. As in, taught the wrong class. Well, there is a first time for everything. Back in November, just a few days after I returned from my epic adventure to Buenos Aires, I was set to teach for a group in Vancouver. Indeed, a group that I’ve joined before. Well partway through our Zoom event I got asked a question which made me realize I’d been teaching the wrong class the whole time!

Yikes!

(To be honest, I was rather apoplectic, but I did a quick regroup for the rest of our time remaining and then recorded a session to share with the group to make up for what we should have been doing the whole time.)

What we were supposed to be doing is playing the One Colour Challenge, Improv style. Thankfully, right before my trip I had organized my scrap strips by colour so I grabbed them and we started playing.

These log cabins were that first bit of play. I wanted to show that within a single colour - blue - fabric gives us so many variations and by sorting our fabric accordingly when we use it, we can get some pretty great results.

Not every sample I use to teach becomes a quilt, nor every experiment. But this time? I couldn’t resist. I just had so much fun diving in to the scraps and making these improv log cabins. Do you see that single curved seam in each one?

Each block was squared up to 7”. An odd size, I know, but that’s what the first ones turned out to be and I stuck with it. You can’t always control the size when you are working with scraps.

At the end of each day after that, I would put on Stewart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe and make a handful of blocks. My goal was to use up the blue scraps. But some of the blues were a bit more teal, some turquoise. Which then led to green. I kept going. I dug in to my regular scrap bins when I ran out of strips. I may have cut a piece or two out of the stash but stopped myself from doing more. The quilt is this size because I wanted to stick to 99% scraps.

And any bits leftover? I’ve already pieced them to go on the back. Use it all up!