Where did the inspiration for this come from?
Mod Cutout is a reverse engineered pattern based on components from what was intended to be a completely different pattern, but much of it started with the fabric.
The fabrics were from a collection I designed for Craftsy in 2019 which was intended to be a modern blender collection. As the collection developed it took on a very unintended retro vibe. I’m not entirely sure I could tell you how I arrived to all the prints, other than I knew they had to be relatively simple (no more than 3 colors in the design), it had to have texture but not be a textural print, and it had to be dynamic (varying scale and types of motifs.)
I started with color swatches. Each color swatch was to be representative of a print. I then began looking through vintage supplier fabrics and through my favorite print resources for some inspiration.
Working at Craftsy, all these fabric allocations came from our buyers. So each collection had a very specific intent and it was my job to understand their vision and make the best fabric I could that fit that bucket. Some collections were so specific down to motifs and colors that had to be used, others were very loose. Fractals was pretty loose. The guidelines around this were more, “We need a modern blender collection and it can’t be like X.” So it became my job to create something interesting that was not like the previous collections Craftsy had done.
It’s a lot of fun when given so much freedom to create, but it’s also very challenging in the corporate setting because your ideas have to make sense and you have to be able to tell everyone why. Sometimes that’s very difficult to do.
I did some design pulls and started to see if I could change the scale, convert some of the prints, and recolor some concepts. This is hard for a huge collection. This collection had at least 50 prints/ colors that all had to be cohesive yet different.
It all starts with the prints.
Once I get the artwork to where I think it needs to be, I’ll start all the coloring. However, I’ve been working on collections, coloring the whole thing 2, 3, sometimes 4 times, only to realize that it’s a single print that’s making the collection disjointed! In those cases, I pull the print, get “the right one,” and then magically, it all comes together.
Fractals is such a big collection that it took a lot of coloring! Every print was colorized in probably 10-15 colors. Which then all got narrowed down based on execution of the color in the design. And you keep going through this process of print/color/collection until you’ve narrowed to the number of skus needed for the collection.
That is Fractals in a nutshell.
Mod Cutout the pattern came out the inspiration that the fabric had a bit of that retro vibe in it. Again, not intentional, but just sort of skewed that way due to how the prints ended up after a lot of manipulation.
Liz Alexander, owner of Quilting Cat Crafts somehow tracked me down as the fabric designer. I honestly don't even remember how she found me, but she said, “I have a kit with no pattern, can you help me?” The original design had curved piecing, so I also used that as inspiration for the pattern design.
I started actually digging through Mod wallpaper. That is where I came up with this design. The mod leave are pretty popular in quilting right now, so that seemed appropriate, but how could I do something more interesting? Well, I added the flowers with the circle centers and a flamed ogee!
The flowers and the ogee scattered throughout the leaves give a little more wandering look to it which is also way the colors have a gradiading effect. These things create a little movement, but are anchored in the consistent placement of a bright yellow circle from the flowers and the pink/orange ogee.
Design is a funny thing. We frequently see something we like, but many times don’t know why. The way Mod Cutout is laid out with the leaves/flowers/ogees and the colors, it shouldn’t really work. There's a lot of “stuff” going on! But with a little strategy (and a lot of reworks!), I was able to place the colors and blocks in a way that had movement, yet felt cohesive.
This is a huge pattern with a lot of templates, but if you can go slow and be consistent, it’s absolutely doable. I did a tutorial video on my YouTubel to help offer little tricks to make it possible. I also find that sometimes just seeing someone actually doing the pattern can really help. (I’m trying to offer videos for all my patterns, but it’s hard. The videos are more difficult for me than any of the fabric or patterns!)
I hope this offers a little insight into how Fractals and Mod Cutout came into the world of quilting.
Kits can be purchased from Quilting Cat Crafts:
Or you can get just the pattern here!