August's Improv Inspiration

August is my month as Camp Counselor for Design Camp 2 [think outside the block] Improv Bee. I've actually been collecting images onto a Pinterest board for the last few months in anticipation of this very thing! The new twist for me in this online bee is that each of the hosts chooses his or her own fabrics and sends packets out to the other members of the bee for their month. I've only ever participated in scrap/stash busting bees up to this point, so this is a whole new challenge for me!

I'm starting with this:

then breaking it down to groupings more like this:

Because this is an improv bee, we're not working with a specific pattern, but more of a guideline. In the past there has been a request for improv robots, drunk love log cabin blocks and in one of the other camps an interpretation of shipping containers. The guidelines I'm asking folks to follow are to stick to a more linear construction (though not necessarily straight lines!) OR to do a wonky or drunk love log cabin construction. Again, my pinterest board and Flickr favorites have a variety of examples.

Here are a few photos of my process with making a single block, using the fabric cuts I showed above:

and once a grouping seems sufficient, I join it with another group, end to end:

...and just keep going until it feels "done" (or at the very least, a decent size).

Once I finished that first block I still had enough fabric left to throw together a log cabin block. Don't think I need to go through my process with that one, but here's a photo of the finished product:

Sooo, the fabric packets will be going out by next weekend and I'm hoping that my fellow Design Campers will just have fun with this! Feel free to be creative!