Any tips on creating images/shapes in your quilts? I'm having a really hard time wrapping my brain around how pieces should be positioned so they make sense when you sew them... If that even makes sense... I guess the real answer is "fuck around and see how it works" but if you have any great revelations, it would be greatly appreciated!
nooooooo the right answer is quiltassistant (windows only) foundation paper piecing software and printable mirrored templates you glue to the back of your fabric with washable Elmer's gluesticks and pin together through the alignment marks!!
you can also always fuck around, you know i'm generally pro fucking around, but genuinely technology helps so much here.
here's the back of a leg versus the front in my recent guy. you can see that there are a lot of quite weird angles that would be really nasty to do just straight out of my beautiful mind. the paper also stabilizes teeny tiny tricky bits like the segments of the leg.
lower-technology alternative: if you don't have a printer you can trace on paper from a computer screen (gently) & add alignment marks & cut out the shapes & glue them to fabric. when you cut out the fabric, add a quarter inch seam allowance all around the glued paper. then you just sew right along the edge of the paper template. this way is easier to remove but maybe a little more prone to imprecision and wiggling.
neither of my recommended strategies are "just look at the fabric and wing it!" i tried that when i was starting out and i found it intensely frustrating.
the other thing is DO A LOT OF DRY FITS. always hold the pieces together the way you want them to end up before turning them right sides together. you can think of it like opening and closing a book. maybe this is too obvious? but i see a number of quilt help posts online where it seems like people are running on trust instead of looking at their pieces with their eyeballs.
you can even glue baste tricky pieces that go together at weird angles... turn under and iron down the seam allowance of a piece and put a little glue on just the underside of the seam allowance, line it up where you want it on the other piece so the "front" looks right, iron to set the glue, and then unfold it back to right sides together. i'm explaining this very badly. please imagine.
DON'T fight the inside-outie frontwards-backwards nature of sewing. use your brain. use paper and glue
this doesn't address the designing the images and shapes part. let me know if you have more questions about designing images and shapes. basically my process is: i draw em.
alsooo this is my opinion as a solidly intermediate quilter. if you want to see some absolutely bonkers piecing techniques, see if your library has any books by ruth mcdowell
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