Spoonflower Cheater Quilt – Lesson 1 & 2

A few weeks ago, Spoonflower announced that they’d be having a Design-A-Long creating a cheater quilt using Instagram photos.  Instagram has become a sort of visual timeline for my life.  I don’t use Facebook at all anymore, but I post a photo to Instagram most days of the week as a sort of, “What I’m Up To,” kind of thing.  It’s fun, and it’s a great way to post a short update, brag about a new knitting project, share something funny you saw, or scope out who else is drinking your favorite whisky (and posting about it).  I’ve got SO many photos in my stream, so the idea of putting a few years of photos into a quilt sounded like a fun thing to me.

Lesson One was pretty simple – sorting photos – so I didn’t cover that here.  Basically, I sorted out for six blocks by color so I had 25 photos of each color.

Lesson Two was this week’s homework – creating collages using PicMonkey.  Typically, this is something I would’ve done in Photoshop, but the PicMonkey interface is really easy to use for this project and made quick work of creating the collage blocks.  Yellow is probably my weakest square (I just don’t take photos of yellow things often enough?), but I like how they all came together!  The Blue and Green are my favorites and happen to be my favorite colors anyway, and the purple one came out pretty well too thanks to my penchant for purple flowers in the garden.  The instructions said that if the colors didn’t work out the way you wanted, you could add effects in PicMonkey to make them fit  better, but I really wanted to leave them as they were.  That means it’s not entirely perfect and each block isn’t exactly perfectly representative of the color, but I think it’s still clear enough that it’s not just a jumble of random photos in each square.  What I love most about this is that it’s almost three years worth of stuff – from flowers in the garden, to showshoeing Mt. Washington, a vacation to Scotland, waffles for breakfast, and having beers with friends, there’s so much life  in these blocks.  Each tiny square holds a special memory.  It’s really exciting to see this coming together, and I can’t wait to order  fabric and get going on the sewing part!