Are you a planner or a complete improv scrapper when you come to making a quilt?  I’d love to say that I was a completely free spirit, but even if I can let go on the pattern, I can’t let go on the fabric.

My Madrona Corners quilt pattern was complete improv, but was entirely from the Madrona Road line by Violet Craft:

Even my (very few) quilts that are not all made from one line have had all the fabrics carefully selected before I even cut one thread.  My Brit Bee Retro Flowers was made from a cross section of all the grey and aqua/teal fabrics I could find online in the UK at the time, but I’ll admit to buying 5 or 6 extras that never made it in because they didn’t quite go.  Those were the fabrics I sent out to the bee, and I made up the rest with what orange I could get hold of that looked okay too (again with a few rejects).  So still not really flying by the seat of my pants, in fact, it was pretty much regimented – you really don’t want to know how long it took to lay out ;o)

I’m working on the letting go part on the fabric though, and while the whole select and cut as I go approach has challenged me, I think it worked okay on the My Small World QAL, even if I did only use 2 lines of fabric:

I’m branching out further with the Moda Modern Building Blocks pattern.  It’s my ‘mindless sewing’ project of the moment, the thing I pick up when I don’t want to have to think about things because someone else has already worked out the pattern (although I’ll admit that I can’t just do one whole quilt with the same block, there’s mindless and then there’s brain dead sewing, I just don’t have the patience or tolerance for that, although I admire those who do).

I picked up this pattern in a sale last November, over a year after it came out, and I decided that in keeping with the bargain nature of it I would only buy enough Moda Grunge Whites to make up the white parts of the pattern and then everything else would be from my existing stash.  Each fabric would read as one colour and would only appear once, and while I would stick roughly to the original pattern colours, I was happy to change up a few of the blocks (the browns have all gone, I just can’t be doing with throwing brown in there, so they’re becoming grey).

Although I’m cutting and selecting fabrics as I go, I finally got to the point where I wanted to start to see how it looked. all together.  Maybe I can’t let go that much after all ;o)  Here’s what I’ve got so far – I had to create my own layout for this since my design wall is too small to hold an 84″ x 96″ quilt.

So what about you?  Are you a total planner?  A total improvver?  Or somewhere in between?