Colour Block of the Month: Cyan

This month's Colour My World Challenge was to create something using the cyan family of colours. I was unsure what to do at first, because this isn't a colour I use often. In fact, there was really only one fabric in my stash that fit the bill. My goal is to try out a new improvisational piecing technique for each colour block, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with image fracturing.

The aim of fracturing is to make an image more interesting by cutting and reassembling it. There are a lot of ways to do this, and the more complex ones can yield stunning results, but I opted for an easy start in order to get a better grasp of how a design changes when it is cut and sewn.

Having mostly seen this technique used on floral and landscape prints, I thought it would be very interesting with my abstract fabric. This is the panel that I started with:

With random vertical cuts, I divided the image into more or less equal parts. I kept an average width of one inch, which means that for every strip one half of the design would be hidden in the seam and the other half would remain visible.

I numbered all of my pieces as I cut them to make sure they stayed in order, and then reassembled the design. I'd expected fifty percent of the image to vanish, which it did, but the new design that emerged surprised me. The shapes were more condensed than I'd expected, and the line across the middle remained unbroken despite the random angled cuts that I started with.

I decided that it looked pleasingly abstract and added a solid border to finish it up. This is the fifth block of my improvised rainbow quilt.