Originally Posted by Holice

I am blushing this moring with all these compliments about my skill at designing whole cloth quilts. I had always admired the tecnique and believed (and still do) that whole cloth represents the ultimate in a quiltmakers art and believed those who designed and ultimately quilted them were indeed touched by the "design angel". However I learned it was not difficult at all. While I had art clases in my earlier life, I had not felt successful in doing line drawing. I learned by copying another designers work. She was well known in the area of Northern Virginia for her original whole cloth designs. A fabric company contracted with her to reproduce her design in a preprinted on cloth format. The original were double bed size and I had to convert them to queen size. It was making circles true circles, adding feathers where the sections needed to be lengthened and feathers all consistent in size. I was drawing one day and said to myself "I have done this before but sure don't believe in reincarnation" and then it hit me.......the same motions being used in drawing feathers were the same I had been taught many many years ago in elementary school penmanship. After that realization I was away to go. The second discovery was that the secret to drawing a perfect heart or tulip is when both sides match and the best source might be a simple paper snowflake we all cut as kids. The final was to start looking around us - there are design inspirations everywhere. Using graft paper and work only on small sections and repeat those for a full design. After all an elaborate feather border on a quilt may be only 12" repeated. I believe the ability is already in us.....always has been but somewhere along the way we either forgot it or lost it usualy because someone said "you can't do it". So quilters - just try.