After a few months of sewing and quilting, I became interested in designing my own quilts.I designed a table runner for a summer fabric challenge using MS Excel, which worked perfectly for my plus sign design. A couple months later I used MS Excel again to design my 2017 QuiltCon entry, but again, this design was all squares and straight lines. Fast forward to October, when Katarina Roccella put out the call for entries for her Blithe Fabrics Blog Tour. I had passed on calls for makers because I wasn’t a blogger. Katrina said she would work with us on Instagram, and I was ready to work.
I decided to use Quiltography to design my entry, since it consisted of HSTs, something I couldn’t do easily in MS Excel. The features offered by Quiltography, the ease of use, and interface are perfect for me as a new designer.
Quiltography has features that allow you to use your stash in your designs, create your own blocks using your stash before building a quilt, and create a quilt design using a photograph.
The My Stash feature allows you to store photographs, taken by you or uploaded from another source, to use in your quilt designs. The app gives you the option to save the name, fabric line, color information, measurements of the cut you have, manufacturer, purchase location, and release date of each fabric you enter. I used the fabric swatches on the Art Gallery Fabrics website in order to design a quilt for the Blithe fabric blog tour.
Once you have your stash set, you can move onto designing blocks. Quiltography offers 186 block templates for you to choose and customize with fabrics from your stash. The app also allows you to create a custom block using a grid and a variety of shapes.
For the design I had in mind, I used the HST template to create blocks that used all the different fabrics in the line in various combinations. Quiltography saves your blocks in a folder until you delete them.
Once all of your blocks are set, you can move on to quilt design. Quiltography uses a grid that allows you to insert blocks for your design. You can choose the number of squares for your design grid, up to 15 blocks square. This works fine for many designs and block sizes, but still, it is a limitation that I would like to see changed in a future update.
Just tap the squares on your grid that you would like to change, then select a block from the wheel on the right to insert into the highlighted squares. You can edit your design using the buttons on the left to open the settings menu, link the highlighted squares and edit them simultaneously, rotate your blocks 90 degrees to the right, flip the highlighted blocks vertically or horizontally, or edit the highlighted blocks.
The settings menu allows for further customization, including the addition of borders and corner stones, and turning the blocks in your quilt on point.
Once your design is complete, Quiltography estimates the amount of fabric needed to complete your quilt.
This feature is incredibly helpful, but I would love to see it expanded to include the option of exporting this information in PDF format for easy sharing and reference.
Quilt designs are saved in a folder similar to the block and stash folders for easy reference.
Features I would like to see expanded are the size of the quilt design grid, to accommodate larger quilt designs, and the ability to create a PDF version of the fabric requirements. The fact that Quiltography is an iPad only app limits those who can use it to people who own iPads. That is definitely a problem for those quilters who don’t own an iPad or prefer not to use an iPad for quilt design.
Overall, Quiltography is exactly what I need at this point in my quilt design journey and is definitely worth $9.99, a relatively high price tag for an app. The My Stash feature makes it easy to jump in and design a quilt using fabrics I already have, or plan to purchase. The ability to design my own quilt blocks using the templates and block design features give me more than enough flexibility in terms of the quilts I can design. Having the fabric requirements and block requirements listed in an easy to read format is incredibly helpful for when I have a design I am ready to execute.
I thoroughly enjoyed using this app and would suggest it for those of you who are looking to get started in quilt design or want a portable option for basic quilt design.
Have you used Quiltography? What did you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Southbay Bella Studio 