QDAD – A Retrospective

First an exciting announcement: I have my computer back!! It’s been gone since last Friday for repairs and I thought I was going to gnaw off my own arms in frustration. But it’s back and I can do things like reply to emails and write blog posts again! YAY!

Second announcement: I suck at math. Seriously. I don’t know if it’s just laziness on my part or what, but subtraction shouldn’t be this hard. I announced last month that I had been doing Quilt Design A Day (QDAD) for 6 months when … well, that’s impossible since I started in February. In fact, THIS week was my six-month-a-versary and now I’m going to celebrate all over again. My apologies. More cake!

When I was working on my webinar, I had a lot of fun looking back through older designs and thought it’d be fun to look back at the last 6 months and  hit some of the highlights. I’ll return to the normal QDAD posting next week, fear not!

Now vs Then

I’ve definitely become more comfortable with my style in the last 6 months. It took me a long time to get comfortable playing with things I thought were pretty. I’m not sure what it is about me (maybe it’s not just me) that makes it hard for me to want to pursue things I like. I’ve been drawn to e-textiles for years but thought they were the “cool kids” and was afraid to join in. Minimalist/abstract designs? Way too cool for me. Some part of me was afraid of being a “poser” and trying it out. (Wow, did I date myself with that term or what??) But like teenagers (or at least, what my friends express to me about their teenagers), we need a chance to try on different things creatively to find out what fits.

Going through my designs I definitely have found some things I “tried on” and thought it’d be fun to share some of them.

The “that should be a fabric” phase

Mostly I think this ends up being a question of scale. When you’re working on a small picture instead of the actual size, scale can get a bit confusing. For most of the “that should be a fabric” designs, I think the scale is just too small. Some of them I did actually make into fabrics. And found out the scale on some of them were too big. Go figure.

“Scale down and add white space” phase

For a while I would make a design, and it would look big and clunky and not good. So I would select all, transform each (an operation in Illustrator) to scale everything down in place, and it would add white space around each element. The added white space made it feel more modern to me. I recall it felt a lot like cheating, and it wasn’t quite the style I was going for so I moved on. Some of my favorite designs feature this effect, though! The cheating thing is interesting, I should think about that more, because it comes up a lot. We really do give ourselves a lot of extra rules that can get in the way sometimes!

“Bottom Right Corner rules, other corners drools” phase

We read top to bottom, left to right, so the bottom right is just a good place to put things. But really. Too much of a good thing maybe? I find it hard to put things anywhere else unless I want them to feel like they’re floating. (Then they go in the top right, natch.) I also seem to have had a “white background phase” for a while that you see from the last two examples.

“2-color” phase

Can I get away with just two colors? Yes? Okay. Let’s do it. This is actually starting to move into my current style although I often incorporate more colors now. It did get me out of my “white background” kick at least.

Current

I feel like my current style is something I really enjoy, but in the spirit of “success means it’s time to try something new”, I think it’s time to try something new. I’m not sure what that new thing is yet, but I suppose that’s half the fun!

I hope you all have a great weekend, I’m off to go get reacquainted with my computer!