Quilt pattern: Wildwood

When I started my Sunday sketch series, I always figured I’d eventually develop one or more of the sketches into quilt patterns. But it’s much easier to post a sketch every week, trawl Instagram to see what everyone else is making, and spend ages daydreaming about quilts than it is to put yourself out there with a pattern of your own. It wasn’t until my quilty friend Alyce encouraged me to submit Sunday sketch #9 to a quilt magazine that I replaced all that thinking with some actual doing.

Fast-forward ~6 months, and the design has now been transformed into Wildwood, a quilt pattern published in issue 48 of Love Patchwork & Quilting.

Caroline Hadley

I am a huge fan of Love Patchwork & Quilting‘s vibrant style, contemporary quilts and magazine design (my day job is in editing and publishing, so I care about layout and formatting!), so I’m beyond chuffed to be a part of the latest issue.

LPQ 48

Issue 48 went on sale in the UK on 24 May, which is my dad’s birthday. He died before I started my quilt-making journey, so he never got to see any of my designs or quilts. I like to think that the timing of this issue was his way of saying that he’s celebrating with me 🙂

 

 

Sunday sketch #47

My designs are going through a bit of a diamond phase at the moment.

Geometriquilt_SS47

I’ve never sewn with diamond shapes before – I guess they must be similar to triangles in how they need to be aligned just right when sewing in rows? I should try them and see. This design could be made with triangles instead of diamonds, but the former would introduce loads of unnecessary seams.

I love the simplicity of this design. Just three or four colours – one for the background and a few for the columns of diamonds – would make a striking quilt.

Sunday sketch #46

Most of the time I sketch using pen and paper, but sometimes I’ll move to Excel if I’ve got an idea that uses mostly squares or strips. Every so often I’ll fire up Illustrator and try to figure out how to get what’s in my head onto the screen.

This design arose from Sunday sketch #21… I clearly have some obsession with constellations, and bright spots emerging from the darkness…

Cosmos2

 

I don’t use Illustrator often enough to be completely comfortable with it yet, so each foray tends to bring more stress than success. I don’t need to do that much — create some shapes, add some lines, fill in some colour — but it’s not always an intuitive or easy-to-use program. Still, I’m learning. This design is not quite there yet, but the good thing about Illustrator is that it gets easier the more I play with it.