Useful Auditioning Tool

I acquired the Westalee Design Kit at the last quilt show. Had not seen this on their website and spent some time at the stand listening to Leonie West explaining its use.

Basically it is an acrylic 12in block that is 3mm thick with 8 point crosshair reference lines on it. As with the quilters auditioning transparency rolls that you can get, you can draw on it with dry erasers. I only bought some good quality dry erasers the other day and set out to try the different colours on one of my practice quilts.

 Bit of a play in the block and then the sashing.

Played a bit more in the blocks...the lines are very handy to draw your design.

Then I produced an overall design

Found it hard to stop actually, as this was a bit of fun. I never used the transparency roll that some quilters use so I have got no comparison, but I must say I like the solid slab of acrylic as it holds the fabric down nicely and bonus, it gives me the crosshair reference lines to use for drawing.

With the kit come a number of drawn out graph papers, i.e. the one below with 24 points.

So you can position your acrylic block on this, align it with the lines and then use the graph to construct your design. Included in the kit are Westalee's little stitching line disks so that you can use them with your rulers to draw out the design. Have not tried this yet, but when I get a minute will play around with this a bit. This will be great to just draw out some ideas and try different shapes and arrangements and to see whether certain ideas will work or not. It is similar to Cindy Needham's transparency that comes included in her Ultimate Stencil set, except that Cindy's transparency has the lines printed on the transparency. 

What I found particularly useful was the square grid that came included

I tried  a grid design that I had seen Jamie Wallen demonstrate on the Quilt Show recently. In fact he demonstrated a lot of grid designs, I think the video was called 'Mystical Grids'. That was a fantastic video...I might have to watch it again actually, because the above design is the only one that I could remember how to draw.

Overall, a very useful design tool.

Karin