The Great Pumpkin Quilt
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.
Tags: fall quilts, pumpkins, quilt design, Quiltmaker