Welcome to Mountaintop Quilting Studio

This is where you find me exploring a variety of creative adventures mostly about but not limited to quilting. I'm a firm believer that one increases their creativity by being open to and playing with a variety of cretative endeavors ... at least that my excuse for today. Enjoy your sourjourn through my studio playroom. May you find encouragement and inspiration, and on occassion, a little pin-prick that may be thought-provoking or spark your imagination. Thank you for stopping by.

I love the feature called CONCATINATION included with our Creative Studio software on our Statler quilting machines. Concatinating is a design process allowing us to create unique edge-to-edge designs using several different but related quilting patterns. We can choose an order in which we would like the patterns to be quilted across the top of the quilt and we can choose how many designs we would like to include in our "new" design.

We can use individual "tack" motifs moving them around on the "drawing pad" of Creative Studio rotating and resizing until a pleasing arrangement comes together. We can also use existing edge-to-edge designs that have common start/stop points and are the same shape. Designing for the feature has become a fun challenge for me as I create different pattern collections. I like to see if I can include at least three different edge-to-edge designs that can be put together in a random order across the quilt top without creating definite "eye-traveling" lines.

Let's look at the designs I created for the Golf Collection.

This is a mockup of 1290 created with 3 repeats. Notice how the motifs line up as they march up and down and across the quilt top.

The "marching syndrome" is even more noticable in this mockup created with a 3x3 repeat using 1291 and look at 1292 to the right. Not quite as bad, but still in evidence. Keep in mind that much of this "marching synfrome" fades into the background most of the time when placed on a quilt enhancing the quilting and fabrics used in the quilt top.

And now look how much more the eye travels in a random pattern across the quilt design when a random combination of all three patterns are used in the concatinating process. Customers will appreciate having a quilt that is as unique and personalized as when they brought their very own creation to you for the finishing touch.

Comments

• Nice job, Kay! Concatenation really expands our horizons and give us great flexibility in doing E2E work. I'm glad to see that you recognize this and are creating designs to use with this feature.
  by Al on 23 January 2009 at 3:48 a.m.