Quilt Design A Day

It’s time for another round up of Quilt Design A Day designs! As a reminder, these are 15-30 minute sketches done in Adobe Illustrator based on inspiration images from design-seeds.com. If you are interested in trying out the QDAD challenge, feel free to join our Facebook group! You’re welcome to use whatever for your designs (EQ7, Illustrator, inkscape, pen & paper, whatever!) and participate as frequently as you want.

When I made this design, I’d been doing QDAD for about 2 months and the repeats of common imagery was really getting difficult, especially if I felt like I’d had a really successful design using that theme already. This was a bird image and I made probably 5 different designs and disliked all of them. Now I think they’re fine, but at the time I think I was really searching for something unique and not finding it.

The original version of this had the offset element in the browns from the palette and I really didn’t like it. I think this might be the first time I realized it really was okay to not use every color from a palette. For some reason before that I considered it “cheating” even though the only rule is that there is no rules. This was the first step towards my more minimalistic work that I’m doing now. As for the design itself, I get sick if I eat sugar (this is a somewhat recent development and it makes me sad), so this design is kind of how I feel when I eat sugar and my response to all the design-seeds of beautiful looking desserts.

This is another design which shows what a difference a mental state can make. The design on the left was created when I was stressing out about a deadline, and the one on the right was created after I’d met the deadline.

I was playing around with a border treatment I’d seen on another quilt in the left one, but am not very fond of the design overall. The one on the right I’m going to make a small portion of just to prove that it’s possible. Designs like that are actually super simple to make in Illustrator. Not very easy to make in fabric, though.

Something that seems to show up over and over again in my designs is this concept of standing out or being unique. This particular design I was in a somewhat melancholy mood and I remember being drawn to the fingerprints in the photo. Which led me towards thoughts of identity and society and how I spent my early years trying to fit in and my later years trying to stand out and how I can be uniquely represented in a system with just a series of numbers. The UPC code doesn’t actually stand for anything (that I know of) but I really like this design.

I have to do a shout out here to the lovely people in our QDAD group. I posted the original version of this as a “failed design” in which I had thrown my hands up in frustration because I couldn’t get it how I wanted. With some suggestions of changing the scale and the rotation I was able to make this design which I think is actually one of my more successful ones!

More hummingbirds! I call this my NBC Hummingbird design because it reminds me of their peacock logo.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend! I’m off to do some ACTUAL sewing and hope to get a quilt top done of a more recent QDAD!