How I plan my quilts (Spoiler: I mostly don’t)
Over the years, I’ve often been asked how I plan my quilts. Do I have drawings? Do I plan my colours in general, or for the quilt blocks? What exactly is my design process? The short answer is that I don’t plan, not really. Usually I pick a block design and figure out how many blocks to make for a certain size, then I sew enough blocks and arrange them into a pleasing (enough) design. I use what I have made and that's it. For smaller pieces, the designs tend to grow organically. In this post, I share four examples on my processes. 1. Starting with a flimsy idea Here is an example or my creative quilting process from 2013 when I created a mini quilt for a competition. The theme was “Patchwork Dance”. My whole work was based on a flimsy idea of the graphics used to describe dance steps. I’d also seen an image of a quilt where multicoloured and white strips alternated, and decided to use a similar approach for the surrounding area. I had a vision of joyful, salsa-like colours ...