Designing Quilting Motifs

I finished the top!!!  When I got it all together I just slumped.  We have been without sewage disposal for three weeks now.  The septic field has failed.  The pipes have dislocated. As I write we are scheduled to hook into the city system, but the plumbers were supposed to hook us up last Wednesday - no show.  Then Friday - still couldn't do it.  Now it should happen Monday.  We finally let them set us up for three nights in a local hotel.  In some ways it is hard to be creative, but I find that it takes my mind off the presently unsettling vagaries of life.

Update:  As I am getting ready to post this they have just delivered the big digging machine so they must be planning the job today.  YEA!

I have been having fun designing the quilting for the finished top.  It does not lend itself to gorgeous, united quilting motifs like Margaret Solomon Gunn creates.  I am a great admirer of hers, if you haven't figured that out yet.  My quilt is an interlocking mosaic of color with lots of different inner designs to look at.  The more you look, the more you find.....almost an "I Spy" quilt.  I pondered the process of designing while I stitched, and have previewed lots of ideas.  No space for fluffy feathers nor would they complement the design.  I have looked at Pinterest, Google Images, books, and magazines.  These ideas get jumbled and have to be sorted out to maintain some sort of continuity throughout the quilt, and I am doing that with pencil and eraser.  I will quilt this to death.  

The quilt will be about 60 x 60 inches and I couldn't think of any way to manage designing on a full sized piece of paper so I finally printed one quarter of the quilt (all quarters are the same).  I had to break that quarter down into four pieces to print, and then taped them together.  This gave me a 15 inch square mock-up to mess around with.  I covered it with tracing paper and went to work with pencil and eraser.

Tracing paper makes the photo fuzzy.  General ideas in pencil.
(Since I took this photo I have made a lot of changes but you can get the idea of the process.)

TIP:   I love tracing paper.  You can see through it easily.  It is nice to draw on.  Pencil is easily erased when necessary.  You can turn it over to get the reverse pattern.  You can fold it to trace the mirror image of a motif.  You can retrace your lines with pen to show through fabric on a light box for marking said fabric.

Clearly the mock-up above does not deal with the actual sizes I will be quilting.  I am using some of my paper-piecing patterns to work out correct sizes of individual elements.

Actual size designs.  These don't all go together in the same block, but I
was able to determine the size of of the grids and other details.

TIP:  You can use paper clips to hold tracing paper to the pattern paper, but staples are more secure and don't catch on other things or fall off.

The first quilting will be in the ditch.  I will stitch every seam in the ditch before adding decorative elements.  That will take a long time, and I will get very good at it and very tired of it by the time I am done, but it makes the quilt look so nice.  I will then be able to work anywhere I want to without worrying about quilt distortion.  Time to get out to buy batting and backing.

Sew some happy seams this week.  I wish you hours of fun designing and creating.