Within the Frame: A Short Guide to Drafting Quilting Patterns for the Flat Frame.
By Deborah McGuire
Drafting a quilting pattern can seem daunting, but old quilts show us how quilters in the past approached the ‘blank’ sheet of a new quilt top. It is most common to mark the patterns before you load the quilt into the frame.
Quilting in the frame offers flexibility as to which you treat as the ‘top’ or ‘back’ of your quilt as the pattern will emerge on both sides. if you have a heavily patterned or pieced side you might prefer to treat that as the back and mark a stitching pattern onto the plain ‘top’.
Before you reach for your measuring tape remember that most quilt designs were drafted using folding as the method. Iron your ‘top’ into quadrants, and diagonals to help place patterns in a balanced way.
Most quilting patterns relied on utilising one or both of the drafting techniques below;
The use of repeating or tessellating pattern motifs building out from the centre, and in from each corner, to create a centre ‘roundel’ and wide decorative borders ,which are then infilled with a cross hatch.
or by the division of the quilt top into manageable gridded sections or borders or strips which can then be filled with pattern.
The building blocks of these patterns are a small number of individually drafted motifs which can be repeated, tweaked and rescaled to fit into any space. Image below: A gridded Welsh Quilting design.
A tesselating North Country ‘Allendale’ style quilting Design c. 1880
Simple templates, made in card or paper, can be repeated.
Simple all-over patterns like the clamshell or wineglass can be used as infill or as all over patterns.
Below: An all over quilting design c.1880.
A simple ‘strippy’ design is also a great first project.
Old quilts remind us that drafting was seldom a precision undertaking. Shapes are tweaked and stretched to fit. After motifs are drawn onto the top, any space is ‘filled’ with hand drawn swirls or whorls in order to create texture. The bumps are the pattern!
Marking patterns can be done using simple and inexpensive pencils, such as chalk, soft lead pencils (test removal from your fabric before use if this concerns you) or washable artists watercolour pencils.
Strippy quilts utilise several patterns, Strippy quilt design c.1880.