Creating Just Brewed

My first quilt pattern! This was a labour of love for sure and I’m very excited it’s out in the world. I wanted to share some behind the scenes of designing and creating this pattern.

The whole process from initial design to finished pattern took about 3 months. Having said that, I first drew this sketch for “The Coffee Quilt” back in 2021. This was before I had Procreate on my iPad and I used an app called Sketchbook. At this point, the idea was for a foundation paper piecing pattern, but I really had no intention of making the quilt. I thought it was a cute graphic and ended up using it as my home screen background for the last few years.

Fast forward to 2023, my goal was to learn Adobe Illustrator. I started by making some stickers and then wanted to try an FPP pattern. I remembered this design and ended up making the FPP patterns for all of these blocks. At the time I thought I would make this into an actual pattern and that would be The Coffee Quilt- done. However, after making a few samples I realized... I did not enjoy it AT ALL. It looked cute but it wasted so much fabric and just wasn’t super fun. I decided to scrap that plan but I wasn’t ready to give up the whole idea.

Apparently, I was feeling pretty confident at the time because I thought I would just redesign the entire quilt to work for traditional piecing and at the same time write a pattern for it. Easy peasy!! Here are some first draft sketches while I figured out how this was going to work. It’s funny looking back now and seeing how far we have come.

After the drawing stage, I went to Illustrator and mocked up the 6 blocks that I liked the best. I made them to scale in the program so I could take the size of each piece, add seam allowance, and start making a few samples. With a few tweaks, I had my final blocks. Then came quilt mock-ups and deciding on colour ways so I could work out fabric requirements. I had never done quilt math on that scale before so it was a slow process with lots of hiccups before I felt confident I had worked everything out.

Over the next month, I spent most of my spare time writing the cutting and piecing instructions for all the blocks. I was a bit discouraged at this point by how long it was taking me to do everything. AI runs very slowly on my old laptop and I often spent time working on parts of the pattern that didn’t end up being included or needed to be completely changed. I was a huge learning curve and I felt like I bit off WAY more than I could chew.

A look inside my AI workspace.. so many little rectangles! Working out fabric cuts and requirements was a struggle.

Come January, I had enough of the pattern finished to give it to my mom for some editing and her feedback. Cathy is a quilter and a bookkeeper so I knew she would do a great job, and she gave me tons of good feedback. By mid-Jan I finally felt that it was ready for a tech editor and I sent it off to Breanna of Rose Ivy Quilts.

While the pattern was being edited I worked on a few samples. Since this was my first pattern and I had no idea how it would go, I didn’t have the budget to hire pattern testers. I settled for making samples of the large and small sizes myself and enlisting my mom to make a medium sample. Using the pattern I had just sent off for editing to make these quilts gave me some real insight into all of the errors. UGH! Lesson learned. Write the pattern, make the quilt, and then send it for editing.

Having said that, once I got the tech editing notes back I was SO glad I hired someone to do this for me. Breanna picked out all the big problems, but she also had notes for so many little things I wouldn’t have noticed. It’s so worth it to have another quilter’s eyes on your pattern before you ask people to pay money for it.

It took me about a week to make edits, and then I sent it back to Breanna and my mom for a last look. With the a-ok from all three of us, I finally felt confident this pattern was the best it could be and was ready to go! Releasing this pattern into the world was VERY scary, but now I can’t wait to see everyone’s Just Brewed quilts.

-Sylvia