The makings of a new quilt...

I promised that I would share with you my design process while putting together this new quilt. First of all, I want to let you know that my customer came by yesterday morning to pick up her 2 quilts and she loved them. She was so pleased confided she is working on finishing up 2 more and will be bringing them by for me to quilt. Woo Hoo.

So now onto the design process of this new quilt. The inspiration for this quilt came together from the online class I have been taking and some hand dyed fabrics. Angela Walter offered a pattern for a modern quilt that uses primarily solid fabrics to make for the Machine Quilting Negative Space class that is offered through Craftsy.com. It offers plenty of negative space to allow your quilting to make it shine. So I had a plan. My last batch of ice dyed fabrics gave me most of the materials that I needed to make this quilt.
Here is my starting point.

From one of our dyeing workshops, I created this piece. It started with a piece of hand dyed fabric, laid out, placed a fern leaf over it and sprayed a bleach solution on it to get a bleach discharge image of the fern leaf. This and several pieces of iced dyed fabrics were the jumping off point.

I auditioned several pieces of fabric looking for the piece that contrasted and complimented the fern print nicely. It needed to share some common colors but also had to be darker to give the contrast that was needed. You can see similar colors in the strips as in the fern print, the pink and blue and even a bit of green. The strips are 2 1/2" strips. All I did to the fern print was square it up and trimmed off about an inch at the top that was unnecessary. The dimensions are 10 1/2" x 35". I hung this on the design wall and the other blocks were made to compliment this as it is the main focal piece of the quilt. I continued to make blocks of various sizes and construction to build the pieced composition around that center block while maintaining the contrast between light and dark.

I continued to play making improvisational blocks, changing the size and featuring some interesting fabrics in the inner squares. Once I had the blocks made I arranged them in a pleasing composition.

I then began adding connecting strips.

These are also 2 1/2" strips. I continued to work along connecting everything.

I am going to leave the rest of the design process for tomorrow as I have a little more work to do. I will share what worked and what didn't and how I "hopefully" can correct it in tomorrow's post. Yes even I have some things that don't work out well the first time. I must say that I am getting very eager to get to the quilting part of this quilt. I have some great ideas in store for that also. I hope you will check out tomorrow's post for the continuing story of how this quilt came to be and to see the completed quilt top.

Have a great day and don't let those ideas that you have percolating in your brain go. Get busy and accomplish something great. You won't know how it is going to turn out until you try it.