Quilt Design a Day

Here’s another week’s worth of designs! I thought I’d talk a little more about the inspiration and design process for each one.

I’d really loved the way the Hummingbird Star had come together the day before, so I wanted to play around with stars again. When I made this spikey plant-style star, I thought it looked a bit like a Mariner’s Compass, so I expanded out the design to play with that. I really want to do a medallion quilt design at some point, but I think those might take more than 15 minutes. But this was an attempt to play with a center medallion. That many seams going into the center would be brutal, though.

Seriously, macarons again? I really liked my macaron design from a few days earlier (which got turned into a quilt top that I finished this week), so I wasn’t feeling terribly inspired by the photo. I started with a fairly similar shape to my previous design, but played around with stacking them on top of each other. This would probably be pretty fun as a scrappy quilt, and looks kind of like a sock motif.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself through the QDAD process is that I really like triangles. They are so dynamic and you can make so many shapes out of them. (There’s a reason that triangles are the basic building block for most 3D geometry in video games and computer graphics.) This started out as hexagons but ended up in this curved path. Hey look, surprise pop of color. That might come up a lot in future designs.

This would be terrible to piece, but I really love the design. It’d be really cool with lots of low volumes, with the pops of color. I mixed in the colors pretty deliberately, focusing the majority of the color with the reds, similar to how the white flowers look in the photo, with the color happening at their centers. The shape itself was chosen because it’s reminiscent of the flower stamens. (Pistil? Stamen? It’s been a long time since I’ve had biology.)

I really need to make this one. I’m fairly certain it could be done with a template similar to a drunkard’s path. Perhaps something close to the templates from the mod pop quilt pattern. I plan to do some testing, I just need to work up to dealing with all those curves. This is all done with circles over stripes. The earlier iterations were downright fugly, but with some persistence I ended up somewhere I really love.

I started out with the shape of the dessert, and knew I wanted to do something fun with the stripe of sauce. The grey stripe was a late addition, but I loved how it suddenly made the yellow shapes look like portholes into a bright and fun dimension. These colors were so much fun to work with!

So last week I made a comment about how dessert hues was the first of many low volume w/splashes of color. This would be the second of that series. This is very high on my list of quilts I want to make. The design took maybe 5 minutes, and yet it’s one of my favorites. Go figure!