I took a deep dive into curved piecing. Perhaps, I should say a return to curved piecing? Pre-pandemic, I was working on a Jen Kingwell project and her quilts are studies in abstract piecing. There were curved seams, y-seams, applique, and tiny little pieces. During the pandemic, I set all that aside because, well, global pandemic.

Then, I was wanted to do some curved piecing particularly for my piece, Turbine. There is a bit of progression in curved piecing. I wanted to juxtapose my ice dyed fabric with solids and work progressively with curved shapes.

Three Different Techniques

1. Slice/dice - If the curve is not too deep, then you can align two pieces and cut the curve and gently sew the pieces together.

   Unfortunately, there is no seam allowance in this technique, so as the curves get deeper you will see more and more distortion in the fabric. Additional information about this technique is available in the Improv 101 tutorial in the shop.

2. Controlled Curves - For more defined curves, you need to add a seam allowance to avoid fabric distortion. For this technique, you can draft a pattern on freezer paper and then add a seam allowance following the technique in the controlled curves tutorial in the shop. This technique is great for distortion free quarter-circle blocks or ovals.

3. Applique like techniques - In this technique, you prepare the pattern pieces as if for applique and then applique them to adjacent pattern pieces. This technique is great for the sharpest curves in your work.

Some skills practice is required for all these techniques, but I think that the outcomes are clearly worth the effort.

The Results

I’ve been thinking about statistical distributions (I know!) and was interested in the shape of the normal distribution. I wanted to modify the shape into certain extremes. At the same time, I wanted to explore a color graduation through both the background and the foreground objects. These combined with the concepts of a contour graph and a mathematical technique called gradient descent that I’ve been thinking about.

I’m really excited by how these works turned out. I’ve got some more work to do for next post!