Sandi posted a link on HeartStrings to this quilt that I absolutely fell in love with and knew I’d have to try and recreate….so I’m going to cheat a bit and work on recreating it with my black and brights. I’ll still try to get a HeartStrings top done with black and homespuns or at the very least some blocks to send in for group quilts but for now, here’s my EQ drawing. I’m not going to try and make this wonky because I intend to use my Accuquilt GO to cut the diamonds and strips.

I was playing a bit with the construction of the diamond blocks which you can see on the wall with this top of Mom’s that I’ve got up while I’m “thinking” about how I’m going to quilt it.

I’m also debating using a solid black versus a print because black solids seem to show so much lint and I want the quilt to be practical because it will be a donation quilt so I’m leaning toward the polka dot in this photo.

For those with questions, I wrote up some quick cutting instructions.

I took the Apple Tree block that I was playing with on the iPad from yesterday’s post and quickly redrafted it in EQ7.

I’m thinking a 16 inch block right now although you could certainly downsize it to 8 or 12 inches if you wanted by changing my 2 inch grid to a 1 inch for an 8 inch block or 1.5 inches for a 12 inch block.

By plugging my block size in a diagonal setting with sashing and adding a couple borders, I easily see that a twin size quilt could look like this.

However, those setting triangles are pretty big because of the size of my block so while I’ve never done pieced setting triangles, I pulled a log cabin block in from the block library, insert it into the setting triangles, rotate it and this is what I have.

From here, I can play with additional options like adding an inner white border. The beauty of working in EQ is that once you have your original idea – you can look at lots of different options easily without having to rework the entire quilt. I rarely make the first draft of any quilt.

I can also easily tweak my original block — what if I used 4 patches for the apples to give the quilt more interest.

As always, although I’m using only a few colors for the design process, I would make this quilt scrappy using many greens and reds.

Do you have a block encyclopedia? I use EQ for designing quilts and while I often use blocks from there, I like to page through a book with blocks and modify or draw my own many times. My absolute favorite book for this is The Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns by Jinny Beyer.

I didn’t use one of the exact blocks in the book – but I played around with squares and half square triangles until I came across this result and I’ve got some pretty purples in the stash that would work. Not sure when I’ll get to it but I love it.

Instead of being downstairs quilting, I’ve been playing in EQ7 and came up with these. I loved how the homespun  quilts from last fall turned out so I’m just making a small variation in the border for the Drunkard’s Path, I’ll do a Rail Fence, and then more string quilts hopefully using up these fabrics once and for all. You can click on any thumbnail to see the EQ image or the quilts.

Last night I played around a lot before finding the Churn Dash/54-40 or Fight block combination and tonight I’ve been playing with border options. These are the 4 progressions I’ve gone through (so far). Can you see the progression? You can click the thumbnails to enlarge.

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