Colour of the Month Block: Purple

This is my second block for the Colour My World Challenge series over at Quilt Matters. This month I created a purple block using a new (to me) improv piecing technique. It turned out slightly smaller than last month's red block, but that fits the mismatched rainbow look I'm aiming for in the final quilt.

I will also admit that I haven't been using all quilting weight cotton fabrics for these blocks (oh, the horror)! There's a cardinal rule of quilting that's being broken here, but the whole point of this project is to be as experimental as possible. There's no better way to find out what will happen than to try. Everything has been pre-shrunk and I'm sure once it's assembled and quilted tightly it will work just fine. I've used some upholstery fabric, polyester and cotton-poly blends. For the purple block, I'm also using the reverse side of the fabric to make the effect more interesting.

I started with a basic stripe block. The bottom fabric is the back side of the top one.

I made some vertical cuts and added thin strips of a different purple.

Then I cut it up again and reattached the middle strip upside down.

It was already starting to look pretty wonky cool, and my instinct at this point was to leave it alone. But was that really adventurous enough for me? Nah. I cut off a corner and replaced it with some leftover strip pieces, and then cut the whole thing horizontally to add more stripes of the background purple. While I was at it, I turned the top part upside down.

At this point there were starting to be too many seams to cut again, and I was really liking the look of it so I attached a border to finish it up. And voilà, a finished purple block! I'm not sure if I love it as much as the red block, but they certainly will go well together.