Back to designing and quilting......and how I design......

In once sense it is hard to believe that I've been out here in Wyoming for a month now and have already finished teaching 4 weeks in my new school out here.  On the other hand I can believe it because it has been almost 7 wks since I've been able to sew on anything here.   I'm thankful to have enough things unpacked and where they need to be here in the apt so that I can actually sew again.

To celebrate being able to sew again I thought I'd write a bit about my design process when working on a new project.    In this case it is the new block for the block design contest that I've been participating in the last 3 months.  

Modern Quilts announced that the traditional block for this month to be worked with was the Card Trick block.  I've worked with this block before, and knew that I wanted to have the basic shape from the traditional block but ramp up the woven effect of the block.    

However the first pass through with the block design just wasn't quite coming through with the look I wanted in order to honor the fact that there are normally 4 colors in the traditional block.








So to be better able to figure out the color issue, I then drew up the block on graph paper at full size.   I then played around with colors.   And then finally decided to use "Quilt Paper Dolls" so that I could see the colors in real life and full size in order to make  what I was seeing in my mind actually turn out in real life.   Can you tell that I'm definitely a visual learner?


Next step was to draw up the pp'd patterns for the block sections so that I could make a test block.   Final step was actually making the test block.   I used fabrics that I had left from another sample block used for a block I'd submitted to QuiltMaker Magazine.   I'm happy with the way that the block worked out.   Haven't a clue what I'll be using the blocks to make once I have enough blocks made out of them.   Will figure that out sometime in the future!