Paulette left some idea of what she’d planned for her Dear Jane quilt. The kit came with 15 yards of a dark brick red fabric, which judging by the yardage, is clearly what she wanted to use for the background on all the blocks.

Along with the rest of the supplies, I also received a piece of the red background fabric with small squares sewn on it, representing the other fabric she planned to use along with the red for each block. You can see this in the picture for the first post.

The fabrics were arranged by color, to form a Trip Around The World pattern of concentric diamonds. I’m a sucker for using color to create secondary patterns like this.

Even with the sample made with small squares, I was still having trouble picturing what the completed quilt would look like.

For starters, the original quilt used a light color for the background and relatively dark colors for the other fabrics – the opposite of what Paulette had chosen. It’s like trying to imagine what a photo negative of the original quilt would look like.

Enter technology. The kit also came with Dear Jane quilt software, which among other things, allows you to ‘color’ in the pieces of each block with fabrics that are similar to the ones you plan to use. This really helped me to visualize the color placement.

The second problem is that Paulette’s sample only covered the main 13 x 13 grid of square blocks. She didn’t give any indication of what she’d wanted for the 52 triangle blocks around the edges, or the 4 odd-shaped corner blocks (sort of like a square with a comet tail). I’d have to do some design work myself.

I spent an afternoon learning how to use the software and coloring in the different pieces. Then I was able to ‘audition’ different colors of fabrics for the triangles and corners.

After much noodling, I finally settled on continuing the Trip Around The World color placement from the regular blocks into the triangle blocks. For the corner blocks, I chose dark green, because I didn’t have any dark green triangle blocks, and I like dark green.

The completed design is pictured above. Hopefully my design choices work well with Paulette’s original plan, and will do her quilt justice.

I’ve also added a page to this website that will show the progress I’ve made so far (right now, zero progress, but I’m optimistic that I’ll start sewing actual blocks soon). You can access that page any time by clicking on “The Progress” at the top of the page.