Sewing with Certainty #5 Creating your Own Designs

I missed a few of the Sewing with Certainty @ Quilty Habit link-ups but I am back for #5 and I have to say this one gets me excited!

I am all about creating my own designs.  For me patterns are a great learning tool.  They are an effective way to learn and perfect a technique but when it comes to making quilts I usually prefer to do my own thing.  

One of my favorite quilts I designed.

When starting a new quilt I typically have some sort of inspiration as my starting point.  I get my inspiration from many places including drawings, photographs, pinterest, blogs and my job.  I am lucky enough to work at a quilt shop  and since I love color one of my main jobs is creating fabric kits and pulling fabrics for custom layer cakes and jelly rolls that we make in-house (although we call them something else since those are Moda's terms).

Picking 40 fabrics for a pre-cut bundle

A good example for me is the above grouping of fabric I pulled for a layer cake which inspired me to make a quilt out of similar colors myself.  The following stack is fabric from my stash that I pulled to resemble the fabrics I picked for the pre-cuts at the store. I also added some lighter fabrics that I plan on incorporating into the background pieces. I haven't fully decided if I will use all these fabrics but it is the start to my process.

When it comes to actually designing the quilt I can be a bit of a disaster.  Sometimes I plan ahead using graph paper and notebooks but the problem is I tend to keep my notes in about 10 different notebooks - whichever is closest to me at the time - and they usually end up being covered in doodles, drawings and small scribbles of additional notes.

These are literally all notebooks/sketchbooks I either pulled from my sewing room or had in the room with me ... I have more - meaning I think I might have a problem.

Unfortunately for my sanity (and my husband's) I used to plan very little of my quilts in advance.  I just plan a basic structure or have a scribble of what I want it to look like and wing it. Not saying it doesn't work well - the Sun Quilt and Cat and the Hat quilts I made both kind of started that way but it does sometimes lead to trouble and headaches.

There is good news though because now that I am actually trying to design quilts that I can turn into patterns I have gotten better at being more organized and more thoughtful about the actual process of the design.  (I recently finished a quilt that I cannot wait to share and will be releasing a pattern with it too!)

I hope you enjoyed a glimpse into my design process - in actuality I could probably write quite a few posts on the subject but for now I will leave it at this.

Wishing you a wonderful day!

Elise