The app is young, but I’m really excited to see how quilt designs may evolve over time: we are actually tracking the “ancestry” of designs shared and collaborated on so we can look back and share with the community. Almost like a game of the “telephone” where you whisper a secret around a room and see how it changes with each person.
If you create a design in QuiltFusion, can you actually make this pattern with the exact fabrics that you used in the app?
Yes, we want to help you make it in real fabric! So generating a pattern will give you material lists with manufacturer skus, templates and step-by-step instructions on how to make it with fabric. We have gone through a lot of work to make sure even the most novice of quilters can follow the directions to create something beautiful and look exactly how they designed it.
Fabric availability is key – you don’t want to design a quilt that relies on a certain fabric pattern only to learn it’s not available in quilt shops. So we keep the library of fabric up to date. Every week we pull discontinued fabrics and add new fabrics. We also make it easy for you to get the fabrics with our relationship with BatiksPlus.com. There is a simple button in each pattern that will add the required fabrics to a shopping cart on BatiksPlus.com. They have one of the largest inventories of batik fabrics, so getting a custom kit is easy.
Will you be offering other fabrics in the future or staying with batiks?
The plan was to stay with batiks – but really, it depends on what quilters want. Feedback is important, so if prints or other fabrics are requested, we will do our best to source these and get them into QuiltFusion.
How often will new designs be added to the QuiltFusion library?
Adding new designs is my favorite part, I love drawing and if I could just do that full-time, I would. We add new designs every week. Some more than others – depends on if we are programming new features, but we generally at 10-20 scene items each week.
If someone wants to contact you about having their designs included in QuiltFusion, what is the best way to do this?
Shoot an email to unclegravy@quiltfusion.com – We would love to start working with more artists – it’s all one big huge collaboration experiment, and the artist's work is part of it! Because of the pattern generation part of the app, artwork needs to be in a very specific vector format, and sometimes we need to tweak work to make it condusive to the fusible web method.
Will QuiltFusion always be an iPad app or can we look forward to a desktop version in the future?
We are planning on a desktop version near the end of the year or early 2016. We have some features in the app version we want to implement first, before porting it over. It will be available on the PC for sure, and “in theory” Mac (sorry, can’t commit to Mac until we get close to that stage of development and do thorough testing).
Any enhancements that are upcoming in QuiltFusion?
Yes! Hopefully by the time this is published, our new update will be out. It will feature overlapping appliques over the border, and a slew of community oriented features in the gallery (comments, favorites, sharing). We are also working on purchasing individual patterns and designing with pieced backgrounds. (Note: overlapping appliqués over the border are now available in QuiltFusion).
If quilters have questions about QuiltFusion, how can they contact you?
We are pretty accessible everywhere online. Email is the best (unclegravy@quiltfusion.com), followed by posting a comment on any page on our website (good for feature suggestions). Facebook comments are also encouraged.