Before There Is a Quilt
My favorite part of quilting is designing.
In fact, I design many more quilts in my mind than I sew.
An idea can bubble around in my brain for a long time. I let it mull. Gradually, I begin to see shapes and relationships. I imagine colors and fabrics. Motifs begin to repeat, reflect, overlap, and connect.
Sometimes I see the design almost as a three-dimensional crystalline structure. I can turn it around in my mind, seeing how the pieces relate to one another and what happens when something changes.
I rarely begin by sketching on paper.
Eventually, though, the idea has to leave my imagination and become something I can actually make.
That’s when I take it into Adobe Illustrator.
From Imagination to Fabric
Illustrator is where an idea has to prove itself.
I draw and redraw, adjust proportions, move elements around, and work out how everything connects. Something that exists perfectly well in my imagination now has to become a design that can actually be constructed.
My philosophy is simple:
If I can’t draw it, I can’t sew it.
Once the drawing works, I figure out how to make it in fabric. One section might be traditionally pieced, another appliquéd, another foundation paper pieced. I use whatever technique best serves the design.
The design comes first. Technique is how I get there.
What Finds Its Way In
I never know exactly where an idea will come from.
It may begin with a historical quilt, a work of art, a dream, a memory, or a landscape. I’m drawn to the visual traditions of different places and cultures, and again and again I return to the natural world.
But inspiration is rarely a straight line. Things stay with me. Something I noticed years ago may suddenly become important. A color, a shape, a place, or a memory can resurface and find its way into a design in an entirely unexpected form.
I think I’m always collecting, whether I realize it or not.
When I Know It Works
As I design, I’m always looking for relationships.
I want to see how things connect and reflect. I look for the repetition of a shape, the echo of a color, the movement created by a line, or the way one element answers another somewhere across the quilt.
Sometimes symmetry gives the design its structure. Sometimes breaking that symmetry is exactly what it needs.
And then there is a point when I know.
The individual elements stop feeling like separate pieces and begin to belong to one another. The design feels resolved.
It has to satisfy my own eye first.
I want my work to be original and a little unusual, but not different simply for the sake of being different. I want it to be recognizably my own—imaginative, thoughtfully designed, and carefully made.
Creating Beauty
Once a quilt leaves my imagination and enters the world, someone else brings something of themselves to it.
They may see a landscape, remember a place, recognize a feeling, or discover a detail I hadn’t expected them to notice. Something created from my memories and imagination may unexpectedly awaken one of theirs.
I love that possibility.
There is beauty all around us in the natural world. For me, it is also a manifestation of a power outside myself—and something of which I am a part.
I believe one purpose in my life is to create beautiful things