Arrows Mini Quilt

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! I actually had two this year, lucky me. Once with my husband's family in Tyler, TX, and then again at our house with my parents who were visitng from out of town. You have to have Thanksgiving at home so you can have leftovers!!

Anyhow, thought I would share a little mini quilt I made a couple weeks ago for a Houston Modern Quilt Guild challenge. I missed the original deadline because I was wrapped up in Quilt Market details, but I finished it anyway because I really wanted to see how it would turn out.

I love it!

Working in small scale was fun, but surprisingly more difficult and time consuming than I had thought. Maybe a bigger quilt with larger half square triangles would actually be easier.

I dont know how other people lay out their quilt designs, but here's a look at how I lay out my designs on the computer first. That way I can alter colors and placement easily when figuring out my design. It also comes in handy when assembling all the little pieces and the bigger negative space pieces. You can see I had to remeasure quite a few before I got them right.

I use either Illustrator or InDesign, but graph paper works wonder too, infact, most all of my designs actually start on graph paper before I build them on the computer.

Here are some pics of what's currently on my drawing board...

First stage is pencil (with lots of eraser action)

Then once I'm happy with the pencil rough, I go over it with a black pen (this is a different design).


Sometimes I'll use color pencils at this stage to rough in the color, but mostly I just go straight to building it on the computer because it' so much easier to adjust both color and scale.

I'd love to hear how other people design their quilts and sewing projects, if you have a technique that works really great for you I hope you'll share it.

I'll leave you with a pic of one of my little helpers.

Mama Bear.