How to Make a Pattern

1. Make the quilt
2. Trace the quilt
3. Get the tracing copied
4. Write the directions
5. Take the cover photograph
6. Copy everything
7. Wait for back-ordered packaging envelopes for two months.
8. Quilt the quilt.
9. Name the quilt
10. Put the quilt on the patterns page of the website

Ok. I did #1 and #9.
It took 11 hours to make the quilt top if you count transpired time, which includes dawdling, eating, making coffee, emptying the dishwasher, opening and closing the door for the cats, and of course playing on the internet.

Things I just had to look up on the internet:
Yarn sales
Ebay: Conversion Vans ( Nevermind. I'd rather stay in a hotel)
Art quilts (looking for ideas in vain. Nobody has already made my quilt for me to copy)
Chicken recipes
Latest episode of This America Life on NPR
knitting patterns for capelets (another wacky style that will surely be defunct before I make one)
Karen Stone (for border ideas. For. Get. It.)
Jane Sassaman ( just to make myself miserable)

Then finally I got to work. Actual time to make the quilt top, 2 hours, in increments of 10 minutes, with 60 minute breaks.
It's not that it was difficult, but, well, it was difficult. I had to work without YELLOW!

This is new for me. I have grasped that there is a huge amount of yellow in my work and I have vowed to curb my enthusiasm for it. You will note, there is some yellow, but not as much as usual. Really.

I substituted ORANGE.

Brilliant! A Stroke of Genius! Revolutionary! Fill in appropriate triumphant phrases. I think this has altered the mood of the piece somewhat. I wouldn't go so far as to call it subdued, but it definitely has a Southwestern flair. I call it Fern Fiesta, which is probably a tiny bit dopey, but it is short and will fit nicely across the top of the pattern envelope.

click

Fern Fiesta

18x 24" Cotton Special Edition Fabric

The Ferns


and the dots (must have dots) .

The space for fancy quilting. I swore I would leave out that space for fancy quilting, but it needed open space really badly.

This is how I make my designs. First I draw the whole thing, and then I trace it using the Wonder-Under release paper (what is left after I have fused the web onto the fabric). The I cut out the shape with paper scissors and place it face down on the fusible side of the fabric.

Using the tip of my iron on a stick, I fuse the paper pattern in spots, rather than pin it. Then I cut around the paper, not through the paper, and make the piece slightly bigger than the pattern. There are lots of other ways to do this, but this is the one that works for me. Frieda Anderson uses a Sharpie marker to draw the pattern onto the fusible side, but that means that she has to cut off the markings and that seems too hard for me. I am lazy.

The leaf shape that I cut out is then placed on fabric that will contrast nicely and fused into place. All my fabric is already fused, so the fabric it is placed upon is then cut slightly larger than this rib shape and that is the backing for the top. No other supporting fabric will be used. I will overlap the leaves and use bits of underlapping fabric to fill in the voids and when that is finished, it goes directly onto the batting. Sigh. Then I will quilt it. Tomorrow.

Tonight I am knitting!