From Sketch to Stitch (or one quilt leads to another)
- Nicola
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
I made a presentation to my local guild, the Shropshire Quilters, in September. They celebrated their Ruby Anniversary with an exhibition at the Shrewsbury Museum last summer and it was a treat to be asked to take some quilts along to share with my lovely friends there.
My presentation theme was quilt design and I wanted to inspire my fellow quilters to design their own blocks. I took my Twelve Days of Christmas sampler along as an example of how a design can evolve over a few years, drawing on previous quilts for some of the blocks - I took those along too - and how the last piece of the jigsaw for that particular quilt was the border on a very special antique quilt.
These are the notes I took with me (although who knows if I actually stuck to any of this) and I thought they belonged here on the blog too. They're mostly arranged in bullet points, to jog my memory or encourage discussion and I hope they inspire you to start sketching...
I’ve been designing quilts for over a decade now and celebrated the tenth anniversary of my online shop, CakeStand Quilts, this summer. Despite all of the discouraging aspects of running a small business, I still love the process of designing quilts as much as ever.
There are lots of reasons why I might start a new design. I might be commissioned by a magazine, a fabric company or a shop. But mainly it’s because I see something that triggers an idea. Commissions keep me pretty busy, so I might tuck it away for one of those or I might develop it into a quilt and ask my editor at Todays Quilter if it would work for the magazine.
You might be ‘’commissioned’ by a niece or a grandchild who has a very particular brief! Or want to create something to mark a wedding or a new baby, or make a special Christmas or birthday gift. Or you might be commissioning yourself to make something for your own home. The latter is how I started designing in the first place.
Finding Inspiration
So where are my favourite places to find ideas?
• Antique quilts, in books and magazines. They could be your own books and magazines – I have a lot! – or from a library.
• Specific block encyclopaedias, like Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopaedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. I referred to a PDF version for many years until it was reprinted in 2021. Both Roosting and Paradise were directly inspired by antique blocks in Barbara's encyclopedia, as was the Single Wedding Ring block I chose for the Twelve Days sampler.
• Visual search engines like Pinterest or Google Images. I also use these to check what’s already out there, so I don’t infringe another designer’s copyright.
• Fabric! The motif in a fabric might inspire a block, like Jolly Brollies, my first pattern, which was inspired by Bonnie & Camille’s April Showers print.
• Other crafts. I’ve found fairisle knitting, embroidery and illustration to be a rich source of inspiration. Antique cross-stitch samplers, in particular, have an eccentric approach to scale which is very liberating. All of my sampler quilts owe a lot to antique needlework.
Recording & Testing Ideas
The next step is to record our ideas and explore how we’ll translate them into a quilt block…
• Take a photo or a screenshot as a quick reference. You can end up with a lot of these, so try and organise them into an album on your ‘phone or a folder on your PC.
• Sketch your block with pencil and paper (my favourite). These are not meant to be works of art but working notes.
• Draw the block to scale. The easiest way to do this is on graph paper.
• Use a computer programme. This might be the free Paint programme on your PC, iPad apps like Touch Draw or a more specific PC programme for quilters like EQ8 from the Electric Quilt Company, which costs about £200. As with any computer programme, there is a learning curve.
• Think about how you’ll actually make the block. Which technique will you use: machine piecing, applique, English paper piecing, foundation paper piecing, improv? A combination? Pieced triangles became a theme in the Twelve Days sampler, so included them where I could in the new blocks I designed.
• Make a test block.
Choosing Fabric
If fabric was your inspiration point, this step might come before you start sketching.
• Start with a pre-cut of a co-ordinated fabric collection. You don’t have to use all of the colourways and you can add other fabrics to the mix. Paradise and Kindergarten were both made with a 10" square Layer Cake, while Count Your Chickens used a Fat Eighth bundle.
• A single fabric. Often you can find swatches of all the colours on the selvedge. Kelmscott's colours were taken directly from William Morris's Strawberry Thief print
• Use your existing furnishings as a starting point.
• Start with a painting or illustration: artists are masters of combining colour.
• Think about the effect your background will have, it will bring out different things in your fabric. Roosting and Kelmscott would be very different quilts without their dark, dramatic backgrounds
Deciding on a setting
Even a quilt that uses one repeated block can be transformed by the setting you use.
• You can arrange your blocks in a grid, in rows or in columns - like Kindergarten and Kelmscott - or you can stagger them to offset the blocks, which gives the appearance of an ‘on point’ setting, where the blocks are arranged diagonally, like Roosting.
• Alternate a couple of blocks, like Paradise, or use different backgrounds for each block, like the Spring Cottage sampler.
• You can add sashing around each block, highlighting the junctions with cornerstones, or piecing the sashing to add an extra layer of interest.
• You can make a traditional frame quilt, with a centre motif surrounded by borders, which is the setting I chose for the Twelve Days of Christmas sampler.
• And that brings us on to borders: the width, the number and the choice of fabric can totally transform a quilt. And let’s not forget pieced borders! The lords and ladies dancing around the outer border of the Twelve Days of Christmas were inspired by an early nineteenth century Australian quilt, known as the Dancing Dollies.
Imagine the delight of that original maker when she came up with her design! Her skill and humour reach across the centuries and we all agreed she'd totally fit in at our guild.
The final three quilts I took along to share all re-employed blocks from the Twelve Days sampler: I used the hen in Count Your Chickens, adding a little chick for good measure; Spring Cottage reworked the goose and hen (and that chick again), adapting them to reflect the piecing techniques in the other Spring Cottage blocks; and the swan sails serenely around the border of Swansong with some new cygnets.
So you see, one quilt really does lead to another :-)
A big thank you to my friends at the Shropshire Quilters for their wonderful company. And to those of you who've been thinking about joining a guild, I'd encourage you to be brave and give it a try. There's a room full of new friends just waiting for you,
Nicola xx