The Design Process

The Avante needs a new quilt on it! As it so happens, Lori's arrived yesterday.  Here's a pic taken this morning in the sunshine, before it got hot.

It's just gorgeous. As you can see, it has two defined quilting areas- the dark X's, and the cream diamond. This is actually good, because it lends itself to repeating designs that aren't edge to edge. I won't say I hate edge-to-edge, but they seem to lack imagination. I spent yesterday mulling over ideas for this quilt, not directly, but while doing other things. My mind works best this way, making connections to shapes and ideas that will just bubble to the surface when they are ready. I went to bed at 1 am, but found that my mind wasn't ready to shut off. So, at 1:30 in the morning, I got back up to jot down  ideas as I glanced through my latest Fons and Porter magazine.  I quickly filled 3 pages, and then I finally my empty mind allowed me to rest.


I have a program on my computer called Gimp, and it allowed me to take the photo of the quilt, and import layers onto it. This provided a good test for some of the ideas. Layers were imported by scanning my note pages and by hand drawing some of those ideas using a Wacom tablet, and then careful editing to allow the background quilt show through.

As you can see, the first design was very sloppy. Drawing with a Wacom takes some getting used to, because it's not a perfect replica of using a regular pen. I had to learn to do small sections and stop often, so that I had a point that I could "Control Z", or "undo" the last part of. I decided I liked the darker areas, but wanted to redo the centers.

These center flowers were taken from my sketches. Because they were so detailed, they took longer to clean up to remove the gray and graph paper that was picked up from the scanner, but once I got just the flower image, I was able to rotate them to make them appear to fit the diamond blocks. When I quilt these, they each will be unique and I won't have that problem. The quilting will much more pretty than a quick sketch, and of course, the thread color will be chosen to either highlight the flowers, or make them blend in with the cream, depending on which Lori prefers, if she decides to go with this pattern. The ones on the dark should be a dark thread, so that it doesn't compete with the diamond centers, but we could go either way on the cream.

When I looked at a saved intermediate step, I was presented with another idea- having the quilting in the dark areas hide altogether. I could SITD (stitch-in-the-ditch) along the edges of each dark square. It simplifies the look of the quilt, but is no more or less work than the flowers to me. The flowers can be done in a continuous line, where the SITD requires some stopping, and precision to line up with the squares.

The other way of auditioning designs is with Quilter's Preview Paper, and I have some of that too. I may do that as a final step to determine how big some of the flowers should be, and to fine tune their proportions so the intersections are consistent throughout the quilt.