My design

For my very first quilt I designed I wanted it to be colorful.  I had a few quilt magazines I had picked up and literally spent hours reading.  I didn't see anything like I wanted but knew I wanted it accented with white to bring out the bright colors I had in mind.

Not knowing how this would turn out I made my way to the local chain fabric store to look over the choices.  I didn't want to use Quilt store fabrics although I knew by then the difference in quality and price.  (Quilt store fabric starts at about $11.95 a yard and goes up from there, it's also thicker with better dye intensity)

I could spend hours looking at fabric and that day was there for about 2 hours just in one section.  I left without buying anything but had in mind how many colors, fabrics and prints I liked. Before purchasing I needed to put the design that was forming in my head onto paper and organize it, I didn't want to make a scrappy quilt.  I took photos of the bolt ends where the information was of the ones I liked along with the price and designer.  This store has a website and there I knew I could look them up and see which ones had matching designs in alternate colors.  I wasn't looking to make it matchy matchy but wanted choices without taking 40 photos in the store although I would if I needed to.

Once home I opened up my Excel computer program (this is before I got EQ7) and started putting my design to paper. My colors were going to include blue, green, pink, purple and yellow along with the white.  

For my first quilt I didn't want it too complicated so I stuck with squares.  I did them in 2 sizes so it would be more than a patchwork quilt.  It took a few days organizing the colors and block sizes until I liked what I had, at least on paper.  I then started numbering them because each of the 5 colors I chose would have 4 different shades light to dark.  From here I estimated how much fabric of each color to buy and waited for this collection to go on sale (to $2 a yard)

It took a good month to do the top and then adding the batting backing and top stitching took another month.  With this one I did some machine embroidery adding dragonflies, butterfly's, hearts, flowers and loops. I used my endless hoop to create the outside embroidery.  

I love this quilt, I made it to fit a single bed as that's the size I take on vacation.  Not too little for a bed or too big to curl up on the couch with and everyone seems to love it as much as I do.