Collection Building, Not Even 101
The first edit of my first collection.
So, not to sound braggy, but I’ve always been pretty good at selecting fabrics for a quilt. Well, not necessarily always. When I first started quilting I used a lot of quilt kits. But once I started picking out my own fabrics I was pretty, pretty good at it.
While I appreciate a good collection of fabrics from one designer, obviously, I also really like to mix and match fabrics across collections, designers, and brands. Before I even knew the words hero, coordinating, and blender prints, I would instinctually construct my collection of fabrics for any given quilt in such a way to give it a good flow and contrast, but not make it so busy. Other quilters remarked about my fabric selection abilities, saying they never thought x, y, and z prints went together, but they love the finished product.
*Side note - these lovely ladies also let me make an entire quilt while thinking it was going to turn out awful and never said anything. I don’t know if that’s endearing or a really terrible thing to do. I wouldn’t have changed the fabric, probably, so I guess it doesn’t matter, but still.
I thought designing fabric would come just as naturally thanks to my awesome fabric eye - which probably ranks pretty low as a super power. But I was quick to find out that it is a world apart to actually have to design fabric vs. just picking it out from a shop. Add in the fact that while I do have artistic ability (something I have to tell myself everyday - hello imposter syndrome), I am quite technical when it comes to creating which is a really big hurdle I need to overcome.
When looking for advice on how other, working designers make their collections, well, it’s slim pickens’. Either people think there’s not too much to the process, or they like to keep it guarded, or (most likely) every process is individual to the designer. What little I found varied widely, from an indepth, 6 step preparation process to revamping previous work, designing for a design brief to just starting and see what comes up.
The truth is, as I see it, that there is probably some variation of these processes that will work best for me. And you. I don’t exactly know what my processes are as I have only kinda roughly finished one collection. But I’m excited to have that because it gives me momentum. You see, the fact that I’ve made a somewhat cohesive collection of patterns is actually thrilling, even through I may not convey that through my description. The collection is not perfect, and it’s definitely not finished. But it’s a good foundation to work off of and that’s what I need. In college when I had to write a paper I would always just type and type, kinda thinking about the overall paper, but really just getting something down so that I could edit it. Editing is my strength. And the paper was so much easier after I got the foundation laid because it gave me something to work with, something I could mold and improve upon. So this collection, even in its infancy, makes me happy because finally I have a jumping off point. I’m not starting from scratch, but I have something I can improve upon and THAT is what it is going to take for me to build a collection.
And so I will continue to work with this collection that I have here. I’ll refine it and improve it and eventually it will likely end up in my very first portfolio (in whole or in part) because there are some prints in there that I really like and would buy myself (always a good sign). But I’m looking forward to diving in on my second collection. Because I have a few more tools in my belt now and I have a feeling the second collection might not be quite as much of a struggle.