Brewing Friendship Process

Instead of just writing the same old "Step 1 - 10" process post about my lastest quilt, I've decided to instead do things a little differently. Unlike my previous posts where I've provided a brief overview of each step of the process, I've instead prepared three videos that give a much more in-depth look at how I do certain steps.

The Design

My designs for every new picture always start as a line drawing on my iPad that then gets adapted into a complete template in Illustrator. For Brewing Friendship, this process took me a little more than a week.

At the end of each day, I saved a screenshot of the template to document my progress. You can see how my picture changed over time in this short video:

The Cutting

If you've read any of my other blog posts, you already know how much I adore my Cricut Explore Air 2, and that sentiment was only reinforced when it came to Brewing Friendship. This quilt is made up of 1,269 individual pieces of fabric, ranging in size from almost 20" tall (ie. some of the pieces making up the road and sky) to just a few millimeters across (ie. the highlights on the metal studs in the horses' bridles). My Cricut cut every single one, and it did so far more quickly than I could by hand.

The second video I have to share shows me cutting fabric with my Cricut over a two hour period of time. Most of that time is shown at 30x speed to condense it, but I did also add some description to the beginning to help explain my use of the Cricut software. All in all, this video is about 6 minutes long.

The Assembly

For every quilt, I like to assemble the individual pieces into larger sections before sewing. (All of my pieces are backed by fusible, so "assembly" means ironing them together.) Doing so helps me keep track of everything (since the longer those pieces go unassembled, the greater the chance I'll lose one or more of them) and makes it easier to line up the different areas.

For example, I assembled the sky as all one section. The trees were another section. The road and grass on either side was, all together, a third section. The lead horses were actually several sections: the body; the harness; the collar, neck, head, and mane; the bridle; and the ears and forelock.

Doing this also makes it easier for me to sew, since, for example, I was able to sew the entire sky, even the sections that went under the trees and horses, before anything else was in place.

My third and final video is a timelapse of me assembling the lead horses. Total assembly time was 7 hours for just them, but I've taken the last four hours and condensed it into a 7 1/2 minute timelapse video.

If you're curious about the "mad scientist" spectacles I'm wearing, they're CraftOptics glasses. They make it much easier for me to see the some of the super small pieces of fabric.

Thanks for watching!