I have been meaning for months to tell you about making the quilts that I have for sale on my web site, and I am finally going to get around to it! I’ll start with the very first quilt I designed for my company — the Not So Straight and Narrow quilt.

Not So Straight and Narrow Quilt

This quilt was based on the Pick & Choose quilt that I started in the Improvisational Patchwork class with Denyse Schmidt last summer. I love that quilt, and I love the improvisational style. However, what I wanted to do this time around was create a design that incorporated improvisational aspects that would be different every time around, but would still be recognizable as the same design every time. That way customers could order this quilt and have some reasonable expectation of what they were going to get, while still getting something completely unique. Make sense?

Pick & Choose Quilt

I started by sketching out the blocks from the Pick & Choose quilt and making notes about what I did or didn’t like about them for this new quilt. From there I decided on some basic principles for the piecing of the center strips that I could use as the basis for the blocks in this quilt.

Next was to decide the colors. For the Pick & Choose quilt I was forced to use what was at hand. This time I could make some decisions up front.

I still wanted to use the Prints Charming Paisley Garden print that I had used in the Pick & Choose quilt, so I started with that and my RK Kona Cotton color card. I ordered up a bunch of cuts of fabrics that I thought might go and started testing out various combinations. This is one set of colors that I looked at (not the final version).

And here it is in black and white. This is something I do *a lot*, and that you will see a lot of pictures of as I take you through the making of these quilts. There are a lot of things that are more apparent in black in white than in color, like the pattern or repetition of a fabric within a design (though that’s not relevant at this point in the process, of course).

I also have this thing about varying the values (I did a post on values a while back). It’s just part of the way I design. I am not particularly drawn to color combinations where everything is the same value. Colors tend to look kind of yucky together if they are all the same value, but will “sing” a bit more if there is some value contrast. And my eye is not trained well enough to always distinguish values accurately, so I use the old black-and-white photo trick to give me an accurate read on the values.

So, once the design parameters and the colors were (mostly) chosen, I started to sew. I’ll show you my initial design testing in the next post, so stay tuned!