I spent $14.99 the other day and it is turning out to be a great investment. I finally quit being stingy and purchased the Quiltography app. Quiltography is an app used for designing quilt blocks and quilts. I have mentioned in many posts that I cannot easily conceptualize design in my head. For example, the lovely secondary patterns that are created by combining blocks or even when the same block is set side by side?  Those are a trick for me. If I look at a block I often cannot see the patterns that will be created in this manner. This makes it difficult to plan a quilt.

Like many quilters, I do love graph paper. I scribble on it all the time, take notes and measurements, count blocks and figure out how many of each piece I will need. But My planning is not always correct. In fact, it is oftentimes incorrect. Plus it takes such a long time to do this. Sometimes I start one sketch and halfway through it I can finally see what the resulting quilt would look like, only to see it isn’t the effect I wanted in the first place. Argh! To illustrate my severely lacking sketchbook skills, here is a sip of truth tea.

Using Quiltography, I can place blocks side by side, can design my own blocks if I don’t want to use one of the many blocks they in the library and all of this takes just minutes. (By the way, this is not an affiliate post.) Additionally, when the user is planning a project, she can upload pictures of the fabrics that are to be incorporated. At first I thought this would be cheesy but it isn’t. I took a few pieces of fabric and took a quick photo, just using the iPad camera. That way they were already in my camera roll file and very accessible. Having the real fabrics is going to be very helpful. Just in case you are wondering, while I am fairly comfortable on a computer,  I do not think this is a difficult tool to learn to use.

Once the fabrics are loaded, it is quite simple. Choose the block(s) you intend to use and load them with your fabric choices.

In the block above, I have loaded the first two fabrics (the green and the pink). The next step would be to choose a fabric for the lower right triangle. Then I would save the block and it would be available to use in a quilt design. On the right side of the screen, you can see the wheel that shows available fabrics that might be selected to populate the block.

When arranging the layout for a quilt, the user can add sashing, borders, or cornerstones to their heart’s content. You can easily set the number of rows and columns as well as the block size. The blocks can be flipped horizontally or vertically, rotated or, set on point.

Once the design is as you want it, the app determines the yardage needed of each fabric. It does not break down the block and give you cutting instructions. The quilter has to break it all down. (This is not EQ7 – it is a $14.99 app, after all.)  However, it absolutely does the part I need. It creates a visual for me. That is huge.  Here are examples of the first few quilts I sketched out, mostly in order to learn how to use the app. Most of the fabrics I used were loaded on the app, only a couple of them were loaded with my photos.

Off to the right, the wheel that displays any blocks you have made. (That same wheel displays fabric choices when designing a block.)

The picture above shows a combo of quarter square triangles and friendship stars. When the blocks first populated the design, the quarter square triangles were all oriented in one direction. By rotating them on every other line, a good secondary pattern developed.

Finally, this design was made while playing with HST’S and Flying Geese blocks. I like the angular, southwestern look of it.

I am quite certain I will get my money’s worth on this purchase. There are some things that would be nice to have, but like I said, for $14.99, it is full of functionality. I love it so far and hoped to share it with you in case it would be helpful for some of you. If you have any questions about it, feel free to leave them in the comments and I will get back to you.