The Duchess Reigns #3 – Full Design

It’s been a few weeks since I updated you guys about The Duchess Reigns and the progress I’ve been making on this huge wholecloth project.

Last time I posted, I’d just solidified my design for the center medallion.  This pretty goddess / griffin / bird:

Going along with the griffin design, I created this lion head element:

I was also pretty hung up about suns being a major element of this quilt.  I started trying to fit them into the borders as well as the center:

Here’s the hard part about design: what to keep and what to chuck.  The first series of drafts of this quilt were like Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, though I might have a sink in there somewhere, I’m not really sure!

It’s really easy to go overboard with a design, especially when you’ve had a few years to really build up a supply of signs and symbols you’re dying to use.  At one time I was trying to cram a triforce from Zelda, spirals, flames, Celtic knots, and tree symbols all in the same quilt.

Obviously, all these things are pretty, but they can’t all work in one quilt.

So I began pulling elements and picked just two to fill the borders with: the lion heads and flames.  Even with things simplified down, it still had to go through several editions.

True, any one of these quilts could be finished and be beautiful, but I didn’t really LOVE them.  This might seem picky or ridiculous, but in order to spend several months on a quilt, you really do need to be passionate about the project, and really love every aspect of the design.

Finally I pinpointed the problem with all of these designs: they shrunk the goddess too much.  She needs to be bigger and actually scaled so the lion heads aren’t monstrously bigger than her.  A bit of resizing and things suddenly began to work:

A bit more fiddling was still in order to make the design right.  With this quilt, I’m not rushing this design process.  I’ve learned by now that rushing just leads to a disappointing experience, and I’d rather take the time at the beginning to really think this whole thing through before taking the first stitch.

As for the design process itself, I’ve used a combination of drawing on paper and computer design using Serif Draw Plus.  At first, I worked with the design on a large scale in the computer, but eventually found this to be too difficult.  Even the computer program gets glitchy when working with 80 inches of wiggly designs!

So shrunk down to a smaller scale, everything works better and then can be resized to the final pattern size, which can be whatever I feel like.  This quilt could easily be 45 inches or 400 inches.  I’ve settled on 80 inches and hopefully it will shrink a bit in the process:

Even after printing out the full sized drawing, I still see areas that I need to change.  I also see a need to plan the colors and fillers for this quilt, as these two elements could make or break the final effect the quilt has.

While it might seem like a slow progress, it’s actually very fun!  The trick is not to get too bogged down with the millions of choices (we do have 365 + free motion fillers after all), but to instead pick the designs and colors that will fit and fill most effectively for the area.

So what’s the next step?  I believe The Duchess Reigns needs a few more design tweaks, but I think I’ll be able to make these on the large master pattern rather than printing her out all over again.  Sometimes things are easier to work with on a larger scale anyway because they’re easier to visualize.

Once the design is 100% solid, it will be time to start playing with fabric and thread.  I can’t wait!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah