Quilt Card Process #1 11-03-07

One of the things I enjoy about reading blogs is learning how different quiltmakers develop and execute their original designs. So, I thought I would share my process for what I call Quilt Cards - small quilts made for a special occasion such as a birthday or to benefit a charity.

As much as I hate all those stiff paper ads in magazines, they are the perfect weight for paper cutting! I get out my box of saved cards and my favorite scissors and start cutting. I first did this decades ago when I had an art teacher who wanted to teach us to actually see things - she had us look at an object and cut it out of paper. no pens or pencils allowed. Today I sometimes need to mark the paper first, depends on the subject. Here are three free cut elephants, done without looking at a picture, but just from memory. None of them are exactly right. I might cut off a portion and tape additional paper on to re-cut the legs (as I did with the smallest elephant) or the head or.... Or I might get a new paper and start all over from scratch.

Here is a dancing cat cut from paper. And a cat and dog that I originated sometime in the past twenty years and liked the images so much that I have used them in many different quilts. These are cut from fused fabric ready to use.

Here is a bird on a tree that I cut yesterday to use in a quilt for the Alzheimer's project. The tree was cut from a card folded to make the two sides mirrored reflections. The bird is a variation on many birds I've cut in the past. All of my quilts have a bird on them somewhere - in the design, the fabric, on the back or the front or in the quilting stitches. Birds are now easy!

Using my paper cuts as patterns I cut the designs from pre-fused fabrics. I always have a variety of colors and printed textures sorted by color into Ziploc bags and a flat box filled with scraps from these pre-fused fabrics.

Tomorrow I will continue to explain my process.