Improv patchwork, abstraction, and the Fall equinox

Even though the 90-degree temperatures don’t feel like it, September 22, the Fall equinox, marked the beginning of Fall for inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere. The term, equinox—when the sun is directly above the equator—is derived from the Latin for “equal night,” ostensibly dividing the night and day into equal parts.

Improv patchwork.

Fall’s changing landscape

In Fall, the landscape begins to change—not all at once, but in fragments. As the light softens and the colors outside begin to shift, green leaves are becoming less green. Patches of yellows, golds and reds start to appear in landscapes. Shadows grow longer. Blooms fade and drop. Trees loose their foliage, exposing barren branches against a pale sky. Colors become muted, less vibrant, as the landscape turns to the greys, browns, and neutral color palette that coincides with colder temperatures.

Improv units on the design wall.

Exploring abstraction in an improv quilt class

This color and value transition is mirroring the work I’m doing in an improvisational quilting class where we’re exploring abstraction, color, and value. The process of abstraction is asking us to look beyond recognizable and identifiable objects in a photo. Instead, we’re observing shapes. The quilt compositions are depicting the relationships between shapes which are being defined by differences in color and value. 

About midway through the work, I became “un-enamoured” with the progress of my piece. After a small group meeting with three other students, my “posse mates” provided a more unbiased view and suggestions for re-approaching the assignment. Through our discussion, I realized and concluded that creating a good abstract composition is the goal—not using patchwork to realistically reproduce the photo.

Cutting apart and reassembling patchwork units.

Note to self: get the idea of “that’s supposed to be the water, the bridge, the land, the building…” out of my head and look more at creating symbiotic relationships between shapes, angles, foreground, and background. I’ve decided that my composition is going to be more successful if I’m not tied to replicating my photo exactly. This is abstraction! The photograph should be a starting point without becoming a blueprint.

With that, I went back to what was on the design wall with seam ripper and rotary cutter in hand.

Something similar outside

Plumbing remodel project.

There is a plumbing remodel happening at the house as well. Here is a picture from my studio window. It seems the universe was also sending the message to take out the previous pieces, recut, and rejoin… to make things work better.

Original pipe removed.

The season is repainting the landscape. The plumbers are updating the water lines. And my abstract improv composition is being reassembled… one fabric, one seam line, and one shape at a time.

Midway through September Textile Love

It’s midway through September Textile Love, sponsored by Seam Collective. This annual event is always an intriguing journey—contemplating what textiles mean to me, reviewing recent and past photos of my work, and thinking bout how the pieces might relate to the daily prompts. 

Prompts (clockwise from top left): Language, Story-telling, Craft or Art, Experiment.

The prompts

The 2026 prompts, as in the past seasons, have been diverse and thoughtful. The responses from other participants are interesting and insightful, and the photographs of participants’ work are always inspiring. 

Prompts (clockwise from top left): Language, Rethink, Friendship, Caring.

The prompts get me looking at the familiar pieces with fresh eyes. 

Prompts (clockwise from top left): Historical, Color, Historical, Rethink.

How to love textiles… count the ways

There are myriad ways to love textiles! The remaining prompts for September Textile Love offer reasons to look at them through a different lens and make new discoveries.

September Textile Love 2026 prompts.

Unraveled. Reimagined. Re-knit.

Everything deserves a second chance—especially good yarn. This pair of knitted mittens started with yarn that already had a story—as a fingerless mitt sample and a gauge swatch—and then found its way into these mittens.

Finished mittens and remaining yarn.

The fingerless mitt already had its moment… as a sample. It also was a single mitt and had no mate. The gauge swatch had already fulfilled its mission.  

Reclaiming the yarn

The yarn that was used in these samples is a cotton/superwash merino/silk/seacell blend in a lovely blueish-green color [color name: storm]. Much too beautiful to let languish in the stash as a sample or a swatch! Time to reclaim and repurpose.

The sample mitt was knit flat and seamed. Once the side seam was unpicked, frogging [unraveling] and rewinding began.

Flat sample ready for frogging.

Frogging and rewinding the yarn from the gauge swatch was easy.

Reclaiming the yarn from a gauge swatch.

Because of my yearlong mitten knitting charity project, I combined the reclaimed yarn with a few other leftover bits, to set the stage for a new opportunity. These unneeded samples had found a new purpose. 

Recovered yarn (dark green) and two other leftover yarns.

Colorwork: a little yarn, a big impact

The mittens started with a corrugated ribbed cuff in two colors. Although a little more time-consuming to knit (simultaneously working a different yarn in each hand), the corrugated ribbing shows off two contrasting colors, provides texture, and adds a colorful detail to the mittens.

Three-color mittens with a corrugated ribbed cuff, and stranded colorwork.

With a few rounds knit after the thumb gusset, I introduced the white yarn with stranded colorwork in a geometric pattern. This ditsy design makes the most out of a small amount of yarn, is gender-neutral, and the pattern—with a 4-stitch repeat—divided evenly into the 32 stitches I had on the needles. It was a fun challenge to see how far the reclaimed and leftover yarns could go. 

 A new story

The yarn had a story prior to knitting these new mittens, and now it’s carrying that story forward into a new one. While participating in September Textile Love this month, the Day 4 prompt was “Story-telling.” Several of the participants cited that part of the story of any textile piece is the story and meanings contained in the materials themselves—the breed of sheep from which the yarn is spun, the country that raises the animals or grows the fibers, the people that weave the cloth. Another chapter to that story is where the maker purchased the materials or how they came upon having them—while on a trip, on holiday, gifted from a friend, a thrift store find, etc. So many layers to its story! 

Remaining yarn after knitting the mittens.

The story continues

Perhaps one of my favorite things about stash buster projects is that nothing really has to be the end of the road. A project can be unraveled, re-cut, reimagined, and made into something entirely new.

There’s still a little yarn left over from making these mittens. So apparently, this story isn’t quite finished yet!

 

September Textile Love: 30 days of textile inspiration

September is here, and that means it’s time for September Textile Love, hosted by Seam Collective!

This year, the Challenge snuck up on me… but when the list of prompts showed up in my e-mailbox on August 31, I decided to participate again. 2026 marks my 9th year taking part.

September Textile Love 2026 prompts.

What is the September Textile Love challenge?

The idea is pretty simple: 30 days, 30 textile-related prompts, and an invitation to makers, artists, stitchers, quilters, knitters, weavers, yarn/fabric/thread aficionados, and textile lovers to share their work and their own interpretation of the prompt. 

There are no right or wrong answers! A single word or idea can inspire so many different responses. Give a group of textile artists the same prompt and you’ll get a myriad of interpretations. But know there will be 30 days of something surprising and inspiring popping up in your Instagram feed. 

Textile stitch landscape.

There is a September Textile Love Planner available on the Seam Collective blog. You can print it out and make a few notes. Sometimes I immediately know how to respond to a prompt, but for others… I have to scroll through photos, works-in-progress, less-than-successful experiments, and the creative corners of my brain to figure out what that prompt means to me.

The prompts are a good way to revisit previous work, review what’s currently on the cutting table, as well as discover new textile artists from around the world. The challenge, which began in 2017, has grown into a wonderfully supportive online textile community. It does not disappoint!

30 days of textile inspiration

So, for the next 30 days, I’ll be celebrating the love of textiles… one prompt at a time. Whether you’re a longtime participant or this is your first year discovering September Textile Love, I hope you’ll join in the textile love. Share your projects or simply follow along and enjoy all the creativity.