"Bent, Twisted and Mashed"

I was searching through the blogs on the artful quilter web ring, and found andthenwesetitonfire.blogspot.com it has wonderful hands on technique info, and the June project was to add strips to a piece of already made fabric, to improve all those ugly unusefull pieces that we have dyed and printed. So I gave it a try, I found a hand dyed fat quarter of teal & pink, that had gotten a bit of gray on it, also darker purple lines and grids, the gray made it very flat. The teal was printed with a potato masher, hence the title. I used three hand dyed fabrics, a hot pink, turquoise in bright and light, and a darker violet to dark purple, I cut these into strips of 1/2" 5/8" and 3/4" NOT on the bias. I started cutting my fabric, eak!! always hard to cut into something you hand made. The idea was to make "Skinny" strips, the 3/4 and 5/8 were easy to sew, the 1/2" was not, I used a 1/8" seam allowance, I couldn't decide if I wanted the darker strips first or the lighter ones, I also pieced some of the strips in multiple colors. It looked too unfinished at first, then as more strips were added, the question became, "when to stop?" As I got around to the light turquoise I decided to insert folded strips, that could be twisted back and forth, I forget what this technique is called, it was done a lot, back when. I should have cut them at least 1" wide. The 3/4" doesn't have enough give to fold back and forth easily. I think I'll tack it down before quilting, and maybe use a bead at each tack. Deciding on the quilting patterns will be an interesting challenge. Lots of ugly fabric is lurking in my stash, so maybe it can be "beautified" too. I don't usually do abstracts, so this is a big "out of my comfort zone" project. I like the color on the piece better than the photograph, the gray is still a bit of a problem.