When you are designing a quilt, there are several parts of the process. The main body of the quilt is one part. Borders are another part to design. I often wait until the main part of the quilt is done before I decide on a border. Sometimes, I like to add more to the design than a simple border.
Tag: quilt design Page 1 of 2
Posts about color, layout, and other elements of making a quilt.
Over my Christmas break, I had the flu. I wasn’t feeling well enough to do much of anything, but I did wander up to the studio towards the end of the week. I had a pile of scraps sitting by my sewing table and decided to stitch them together and see what happened.
The first baby quilt I made in flannel was a jungle themed quilt. I was making it for a co-worker. She was doing a jungle theme for the nursery, so I did my best to come up with a fun quilt. This was another quilt where I didn’t have a pattern, just some sketches of jungle animals.
I have made many kid quilts over the years as gifts for friends, family, and coworkers. Only once have I made a quilt that was a commission. I had made a quilt for a co-worker and they loved it so much they had me make one for their older child.
Sometimes when you start on a project you have an idea of what the finished product will look like but end up with something entirely different. Several years ago, I was planning a spinning stars quilt from a block I had seen. I had chosen some fun and funky fabrics. I packed them up and headed off to a quilt retreat. It was January, and it was the year that the Indianapolis Colts won the Superbowl.
Sometimes you have some odds and ends left over from a project. This can be something you cooked or something you made. Here is an example of using the cut off parts of a quilt I made a few years ago for a cousin’s grandbaby.
In my post about the challenge quilt Snow Goose, I mentioned paper piecing. There are plenty of tutorials about it out there, but I thought I would show you how I do it.
In my discussion of color in this post, I showed a quilt that used two blocks to create the design. This quilt also uses two blocks, and creates an interesting secondary design.
This was from one of the earliest classes I took after I joined my local quilt guild. It was before I started putting labels on my quilt, but I am pretty sure it was made in 2003.
The two blocks used in the quilt are commonly called a square-in-a-square and an eight-pointed star. Blocks often have more than one name, depending on when an where they were published. This square-in-a-square has also been called an economy patch.
The eight-pointed star in this quilt has two different color layouts.
The one on the left is the center block. The one on the right is the four corners.
The instructor was encouraging us to use our color placement to make secondary designs. I was so new to quilting that I didn’t understand what that meant until I took this class.
By this time, I had started to understand that the quilting design added to the overall appearance, so I spent some time deciding how to quilt this one. The arc shape is the same size in the pale green circles as it is in the diagonal line going across the quilt from corner to corner. You can see it much better in this photo of the back of the quilt.
Quilts offer a lot of opportunity to play with color and color placement. When you change the color placement on a design, you can get very different looking results.
I have taken a fair number of quilting classes over the years. My favorite classes are those that stretch my skills and teach me new things.
In 2008, my guild had a teacher in named Sharyn Craig. Her class was teaching a couple of piecing skills – curved seams and y-seams. Piecing is the term for how you put the fabric together to make the quilts.
For the quilt show that was taking place during the 25th anniversary of my local quilt group, we were given some white fabric with a silvery sheen and told that the block had to be divisible into 25 squares. There was also a maximum size limit for the quilt.
