Designing for Makower

I've mentioned before that I've been working with Makower, designing quilts for their new lines.  I love the thrill of seeing the new prints and working with Jayne at Makower to come up with something that suits the ideas they have for the line.  For this new "Jolly Farm" line, they wanted something which used the wonderful alphabet panel which you can see here so this was my starting point.

There are lots and lots of wonderful prints in this line, full of sheep, farmyard scenes, tractors, cows and more.  We decided to just take a few of these prints and to mix with a cream solid to keep the quilt very clean and simple.  The alphabet panel is cut up and scattered through the quilt, mixed in with the tractor, sheep and cow prints.  We wanted a neutral colour scheme for this quilt because girls like farms too, right?  But there are plenty of stronger boy colours in the line if you wanted to make the quilt much more masculine! 

Once again the quilt was drawn up in Touchdraw but this was a first for me in that I managed to drop jpeg images into the quilt which is not yet a Touchdraw feature.  For those of you familiar with Touchdraw I found my iPad could not cope with the memory needed to work with all that data so transferred the project to Touchdraw on my macbook which coped absolutely fine.  If you want to try the same, you first need to crop the photo in a photoediting program to the approximate size you need (in this case 3" x 4").  You then drop the photo into your Touchdraw project where you can re-size it to the exact size you need and can then duplicate, move, copy and paste as needed.