Ruth B. McDowell's Design Workshop: Turn Your Inspiration into an Artfully Pieced Quilt

By Ruth B. McDowell

The master piecer teaches you to design unforgettable art quilts from your own images. Companion to her piecing book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 25, 2007
• ISBN: 9781607053149

Book preview

ELEMENTS OF PIECED DESIGN

As you begin to create your own quilt designs, you will see how the piecing affects the design, and, in turn, how the design affects the piecing. This section looks at some of the choices you can make to achieve the desired look and to make the piecing easier and more effective.

PIECED SEAMS

Shifting Endpoints

In traditional blocks, many seams often meet at a single point, or two or more seams meet at a single point on a line.

Seams end at single point.

There is no technical reason why this must be so. As quilters know, seams coming into a single point are more difficult to construct. Unless there is a visual reason for that specific effect, you might want to shift some of these seams in a nontraditional way.

Endpoints shifted

The result is often more variety and movement in the design. Look at the two examples of a pieced tulip. In the first, the seams meet at a point on the outside edge of the block. In fact, tulip petals do not end in sharp points; they are slightly rounded or blunted on the tips.

In the following example, the outside edge of the block forms a part of the tulip petals, rounding the tips. The blocks have exactly the same number of pieces. The second one looks more natural and avoids matching points, making it easier to sew.

If making points match and making life difficult isn’t the reason you are sewing, and loosening up intersections and shifting edges produces a variety of interesting visual designs, then why not?

In Lightning Strike I could have drawn the design in the blocks so that the diagonal yellow bars met exactly in a big zigzag down the middle. I found it much more dramatic, and much more electric, with the yellow bars not quite matching.

Lightning Strike, Ruth B. McDowell ©1992, 43½˝ × 77˝

Moving Diagonals Away From the Corners

Most traditional blocks with a diagonal seam have that diagonal right at a corner. Many quiltmakers who come from traditional quilt backgrounds automatically follow this pattern when they begin to design their own blocks. When joining four of these blocks together, eight seams will come into a single point that can become bulky and awkward.

Broken Dishes block

Intersection of four Broken Dishes blocks

But see what happens when the × in the middle of the Broken Dishes block is twisted away from the corners.

Pinwheel blocks

Shift diagonals away from corners.

Intersection of four Pinwheel blocks

Compare the overall visual effect of these two designs. Broken Dishes is quite traditional and rather static. The Pinwheel block is more unusual and has motion with an implied spin. Joining four Pinwheel blocks like this together is simpler and cleaner.

When you look at traditional blocks, think about this approach, and you can decide which visual effect is appropriate for your particular quilt.

SHIFTING FOCUS

Almost all traditional piecing calls for the precise matching of intersecting seams. However, I don’t make quilts to see how many perfect corners I can make. I am interested in the visual impact of the pieced top. Deliberately planning mismatched seams and corners can do a number of visually interesting things to your piecing.

Intersecting Seams

Experienced quiltmakers often deal with traditional Four-Patch blocks. The only tricky part of the sewing process is making the horizontal seams match exactly when sewing together the two vertical halves of the block. With a traditional Four-Patch, the visual focus is on the center point where all four seams come together.

Four-Patch block

Consider what happens to the visual effect of the block if you deliberately offset the seams a bit.

Slipped Four-Patch

Notice how the seam that is continuous becomes stronger and takes on more importance, while the interrupted seam becomes secondary or weaker.

Depth of Field

This slipping can be used to play with the depth of field in piecing, almost in the way you would with a camera. The continuous seam is the one in focus. In my Ginkgo Biloba quilt, there are two clusters of leaves: the yellow ones that you see most easily and a second brown cluster behind the yellow leaves in the lower part of the quilt.

Ginkgo Biloba, Ruth B. McDowell ©1999, 54˝ × 51˝

Seams extending from the yellow leaves interrupt and fracture the brown leaves; mismatching the seams of the brown leaves pushes them back in the image.

Shifting Focus in a Landscape

Applying the concept of slipped seams and depth of field to more complicated piecing has very interesting results. The best way to see the effects is to try it out for yourself. You can make both of the little landscapes discussed below using my freezer-paper template method as described in Ruth B. McDowell’s Piecing Workshop.

A Simple Pieced Landscape

Here’s a little fabric scene to make. Six tree trunks of varying sizes form a screen between the viewer and a lake and distant mountain. You will notice that in this drawing I could remove the trees, and the horizontals forming the remaining landscape would make continuous lines.

Landscape 1

The sewing proceeds in vertical columns in the spaces between the trunks. (See Landscape Sewing Order on next page.) If you want, you can use slightly different, but related, fabrics for the different elements from one column to the next.

Press all the seams toward the bottom edge in each column and toward the trees when joining the trees to the