Quilting Patterns

One of the major struggles I’ve had in upgrading my computer equipment is that I can’t abandon Mac OS 9. The trouble is that I used to use the glorious program WordPerfect until the evil empire Microsoft started turning everyone into software zombies. So now I have lots and lots of documents in WordPerfect, stuff I still use, that I can’t access if I upgrade. I’m working hard on moving them all to other formats, but some of it’s pretty difficult to move.

The BIG PROBLEM is that I used to design quilts in the old vector graphics program that was included wihth WordPerfect - it was actually quite good for piecing patterns. The limitations of the graphics program closely resembled the limitations of actual piecing. Helpful! So I probably have 40 quilt designs that are stuck in the WP graphics program.

Anyway, as I drag the designs kicking and screaming into this century, I’m going to start posting them here. I started creating these designs in maybe 1998, about 10 years ago. I might make a gallery of them, start using fabric swatches to flesh them out - I quite like these old designs I made. They’re almost all queen-size, I think, and I included one-foot-length measurement bars across the side and top for scale/sizing. I also often made a pillow design to go with it.

Amish-Style Quilt

This first design is a tribute to Amish quilts. Amish quilts have several hallmarks - dark, solid colors, extensive use of black/navy/brown as a unifying theme, very strong graphic elements. The designs are often simple and with non-repeating motif (like one big central red square on black). Amish quilting, like many things Amish, is meant to be simple and plain, and is made of strong, practical fabrics. This one that I designed is meant to focus on those elements, using only one brighter color - which in this case would be unbleached cotton, although it looks yellow in the design.

In fact, I think Amish quilts influenced my quilt design decisions a lot, thinking about the ones I have yet to recover. I see the simple large-central-diamond motif that’s common in Amish quilting in my designs. As time went on, many Amish quilts became brighter and more detailed, or just brighter in some cases. If you are interested, the Lancaster Quilt and Textile Museum has a lot of great resources, being sort of ground zero for this style of quilt.