Posts Tagged ‘quilt design’

Changing It Up: From Christmas to Industry

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, Quilt Lifestyle, Uncategorized

I posted an image of my recent modern Christmas wreath quilt on Instagram, and a follower named Karen saw “urban-industrial style Christmas.” What a great description!

Oh, Christmas Wreath by Diane Harris; quilted by Julie Lechner @beenquiltin

Her thoughts moved me to play around with this design and purposely go for an industrial look. So I moved away from Christmas entirely, to these possibilities.

A little bit different, but it still feels like the same quilt. Sashing is wider and all of the background and the border is one color.

Here I moved to a darker background color. I kind of like this idea. In terms of fabric, I’d use a lot of variety in the Bow Ties. (Ha, they don’t even look like Bow Ties now!)

More playing around. I’m not sure how effective this really is. But you never know until you try, so I don’t rule anything out when I’m experimenting, especially if it’s just in EQ. Even in fabric, play is the name of the game.

Whoa. This happened by accident! The background is the same color as one of the Bow Ties, so that piecing disappears and they look like weird C’s. Now we’re getting somewhere. In reality you wouldn’t actually piece the C’s, you could just use a solid patch in the same fabric as the background. I love this one, and surprisingly, it looks Christmas-y to me once more.

I had one more thought. I changed the gray to another green.

Like I said, you never know until you mess around!

A note about Electric Quilt design software: I resisted upgrading to EQ8 from EQ7 because I thought I didn’t have time to learn a new program. But when I did upgrade, I was blown away by how easy and intuitive it is. I spent almost zero time learning EQ8 because everything felt natural and logical. I love it. If you’re interested in designing quilts, you should get it. Well worth the investment!

Today, I wish you the courage, the curiosity and the commitment to play.

Let’s Talk Quilts! Does your quilt group need a speaker for 2019 or 2020? I’m booking entertaining, energizing, inspiring trunk shows now.

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Playtime for Quilters

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas, Quilt Lifestyle

I’ve been thinking about play.

 

I’ve been visiting my daughter and her family in Hong Kong, where they work at Hong Kong International School. The lower primary school finished a new building over the summer.

What is knocking my socks off is how the educational areas of this building are designed for children aged 4 to 7, and it’s all about play.

The Great Pumpkin Quilt

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas

There’s a new magazine out, and it contains my favorite pumpkin quilt. Try and spot Quiltmaker Reader Favorites on the newsstand, because it’s chock-full of great stuff.

I was pleased to open it up and spot one of my designs inside. Pumpkins and Patches is as friendly and happy now as it was when first published in 2014.

Here is one of the original diagrams I created for Quiltmaker. They made a good decision to pattern it as a throw rather than as this 77″ x 101″ monster!

This quilt illustrates a couple of useful design tricks. The first one is that I exaggerated the height of the pumpkins.

I wanted to create space for interesting piecing, and I thought tall pumpkins would be more attractive than fat ones. You can usually exaggerate a design element in order to add a great deal of interest and possibility.

The other trick is seen in the stars.

Do you see how the points are kind of wonky? They are not all the same size, and the center star differs from the others. And you can probably tell that the star centers are not square, they’re rectangular.

So the design trick is simple, really: change the shape of a design element. Instead of having stars with square centers and matching points, I changed things up. The entire quilt is better than it would be if the stars were ordinary.

I imagined this quilt a little darker and with more solid-colored borders. Quiltmaker imagined it with brighter colors and a striped border! Both are fine, just different.

That happens sometimes: You submit an idea on paper, and you envision it a certain way. But then the available fabrics are different, and so the quilt turns out differently. You learn to hold your designs loosely, because once you send it out into the world, anything can happen.

Kind of like having children… 🙂

Get Quiltmaker Reader Favorites online.

Get the digital pattern for Pumpkins and Patches.

Create Transparency in a Quilt

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas

Transparency is a great trick, and it’s especially effective in quilt design. My recent X Marks the Spot for McCall’s Quick Quilts makes good use of transparency to create interest in an otherwise ordinary design.

X Marks the Spot appears in McCall’s Quick Quilts June/July ’17. Photo by Mellisa Karlin Mahoney. Used with permission.