When I was at the International Quilt Festival last year I had the pleasure of hearing a lecture from Sue Heinz of Kizmet Quilting.

In her talk, she showed us how to break down quilting designs so intricate designs could be quilted with minimum marking. Now THAT captured my imagination!!

She did a “hands-on” lecture and I came away with these designs…..

I had been interested in trying some of these techniques, so I purchased her book…..

AND one of her marking rulers…..

I figured that this would be something that I could play with during my upcoming busy work season so I decided to….

I made two large quilt sandwiches and marked them up. the first was using the above template to create a large section of 1-inch squares…..

I will use this piece to try designs such as these…..

For the circles, I bought a simple circle template from Amazon…..

It is stabilized on a thumbtack……

The circle was easy to draw…..even while holding the camera in the other hand!!!

I then used a Cross Hair ruler…….

to divide the circle into 16 sections…..

I now have a piece with lots of circles ready to quilt…..

….in designs similar to these…..

My plan is to do this practice on video and you can see exactly what works and what doesn’t so be on the lookout for these posts on upcoming Fridays!!!