This summer I started co-hosting the Quilts Unscripted Bee with a group of 10 quilters. It is an improv quilt bee and every month the host for the month gives us a prompt. These can vary greatly. There might be a limited palette. The prompt might be about a feeling, or a style, or creating something representational.

Sarah Ruiz kicked off our first month in June with a really fun one. She gave us a limited color palette and asked us to use solids. Then she had a sign up for each person to pick some letters of the alphabet so she would end up with one of every letter to make an improv alphabet quilt, with a bit of a ransom note feel. Sarah also provided us with a Pinterest board with many alphabet styles to inspire us. She asked that our letters each have a different style.

I wasn't fast enough to get Q in the signup and ended up picking G, U and Y.

I made my U first, making a couple improv Drunkard's Path blocks to use as the curves.

I implemented my Scrappy Slab technique in building my Y.

And I saved the G for last, probably because I found it most intimidating. I'd been thinking about the ransom note style and knew I wanted to make one letter that looked like it was cut out of a piece of paper, hence the border around the G. I opted for a lower case G so there would be fewer curves to deal with and chose a Drunkard's Path unit for the top of the G. In fact, it was the inner piece remnant from the U above.

You can see more of our bee's blocks on Instagram at #quiltsunscriptedbee. I recently shared my hammock and book blocks. And I have one more month of blocks to catch up on that I'll write about soon.

Thanks for visiting!