Develop Your Creativity

One of the best pieces of advice I ever had was from an art teacher who told me to stop being so worried about how a drawing was going to turn out. If at the end of the class I hated it, what had I lost? A large sheet of not particularly expensive paper, some pencil lead, part of an eraser and a few hours of my time.

The same can be said for making a patchwork. If you've tried something new and don't like the result, what have you lost? A bit of fabric, several metres of thread and a few hours of your time. And you can always use it as a fancy dusting cloth.

It's only by trying out a variety of ideas and techniques that you discover new possibilities that renew your creativity and enthusiasm. Or you learn that something definitely doesn't work for you and you revert to what you were doing, but as a definite choice rather than because that's all you know.

So if you believe you're a die-hard traditional quilter who'd be lost without her precisely pieced patterns, you should try making a scrap quilt. This'll give you the familiarity of a pieced design but you'll be challenged in your choice of fabrics.

Scrap quilts are not about carefully co-ordinated fabrics but invite careful observation of your fabric stash in the challenge to make each block of interest in itself, rather than just another matching, carefully pieced one that's identical to all the others in the quilt.

Or if you've got a bit of fabric you adore but can't bear to cut up into small pieces, design your quilt around the fabric rather than forcing the fabric into a design.

If this sounds like too much of a challenge to you or you're not convinced that you could do it, I suggest you read two of Roberta Horton's wonderful books: Scrap Quilts: The Art of Making Do and The Fabric Makes the Quilt, both are available from C&T Publishing .

Roberta's Scrap Quilts is a great way into reassessing how you put fabrics together. She explains how to use fabrics in unexpected ways to make a quilt look more interesting e.g. how light and dark fabrics affect the way you perceive a quilt pattern, making the same block look bigger or smaller or even like a different block altogether.

She takes a careful look at different fabric designs, from small- and large-scale prints to dots and stripes, and how to use them in unexpected ways.

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