A Quilt Pattern Bites the Dust

Update: This quilt pattern is now available here in my shop!

This quilt has been sitting completely finished for at least a year. Here is it's story. Once upon a time when the whole 'tribal' trend was in its early stages, I had a flash idea of a quilt design.

As an aside, I call it a 'flash idea' when I suddenly have a mental picture of the finished quilt design. When this happens, I could (but only sometimes actually do) sit down and draw the whole thing out immediately before it fades. This 'flash idea' type is different than the other type of idea I tend to have more often, which is more of a fuzzy concept, like 'how about if I made a striped gray and white quilt with 2.5" squares?'.

So back to this quilt. I had the flash idea, and I actually drew it out. It looked identical to the quilt above, only I had envisioned pink along the side instead of periwinkle.

The idea originated because I had been looking at the Delectable Mountain quilt block in an old book and had thought it would make a great quilt design that would shamelessly fit in with the Aztec trend;) I immediately thought it might be THE quilt design that I'd manage to make into a PDF pattern to sell.

So I started trying out blocks and puzzling away. My first problem was that the original block I was trying to make, in which you make a huge half square triangle and then cut it into four strips and rearrange it, ends up making a rectangular shape. This is because you cut this half square triangle into four strips and then when you sew it back together you lose a few inches in seam allowance.

So why the big deal? Well, this 'squashed' new rectangular block completely messed with my original look, which absolutely needed this shape to be taller. So my only solution was to overcompensate and make the half square triangle into a half square rectangle. This is automatically a lot trickier, especially to explain clearly and simply in a pattern. I worked on this for ages and made so many blocks!

In the end I did get a completed rough draft of the pattern. I even got my mom to pattern test it for me, and I made another version, the scrappy one below. (I had a picture of the one my mom made, but I can't find it, grrrr.)

I wrote it up in three sizes. Because the whole impact of the design would be lost by adding or subtracting blocks to make smaller and larger sizes, I increased and decreased the size of each block so that the different quilt sizes would all look the same.

Then I kind of got stuck because somehow I wasn't quite happy with my method of explaining. I find this to be a really hard aspect of writing a tutorial or pattern. I think maybe I expect a bit much of myself (at least when I really analyze others' patterns) but I try so hard to make everything perfectly clear and in the end it all feels like a muddled mess to me! Not to mention that I know zilch about graphic design...

So I put it on the shelf for awhile.... and now there's so many similar quilt patterns available, and I've second guessed it to pieces...and have officially sworn off of ever trying to write another pattern.

So this all sounds very Woe Is Me! But truly it's not, although I do cringe when I think of all the time I spent on some of these patterns. I realized that I simply don't have the skills in this area, and although selling pdf patterns seems like a great way to make some money, it's just not for me! I'm really happy with this realization and for now I'll just keep making quilts and selling them for enough to make my hourly wage. It's what I'm happiest doing anyway!