PreQuilt Twice, Cut Once! with PreQuilt (Laura Henneberry and Gar Liu)
Hello Canada and all its wonderful Modern Quilters!
I’m Laura, a quilter and one half of PreQuilt. And Gar is my husband, a web developer and the other half of PreQuilt. We’re both lucky to have a creative outlet, yet our tools are very different. I cut up fabric and sew it back together to create quilts and Gar uses code to create whimsical digital side projects, like Randomise.me and Stardust Particles. We never foresaw that we’d combine our two passions together into PreQuilt…
Hold up, what is PreQuilt you ask? Good question! PreQuilt is an online digital colouring page application for quilt patterns and a quilt design application. All you need is the internet, a browser and a device! Its best on a computer, but is compatible with iPads and mobile phones as well.
Circus Tent Quilt designed by Laura Henneberry of Commonwealth Quilts
We inadvertently started PreQuilt in early 2018 when I was struggling to visualize my quilt, The Circus Tent Quilt, in Illustrator. One night, Gar leaned over my shoulder and said something along the lines of, “I could program you something that could randomly pull your colours into the quilt design layout” and thus PreQuilt was born.
Digital Coloring Pages for Circus Tent Quilt on PreQuilt
PreQuilt launched in July 2018 as a digital colouring page for The Circus Tent Quilt. What I love so much about what Gar was able to program was the ability to quickly visualize what the quilt could look like with the colours that I chose. Want a rainbow of colours, but not sure how’d that look? Preview it in PreQuilt! What about blues and greys? Preview it in PreQuilt!
Cascade by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color
Then we thought, if this is helpful for me, maybe it’d be useful for other quilters and other pattern designers! Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color was our first digital coloring page collaborator and programming her quilt, Cascade, into PreQuilt was really instrumental in not only broadening the variety of quilts on PreQuilt (doubled it, haha) but it also pushed us to develop the capability of PreQuilt as a design application.
November Round Gemstone (Digital Colouring Page) for Andrea Tsang Jackson of 3rd Story Workshop
Over the past year and a half, PreQuilt has grown in its capabilities as an online platform for digital colouring pages as well as a quilt design application. We now have 15 international and independent quilt designers with 36 digital colouring pages, including one for Andrea Tsang Jackson’s round gemstone from her book, Patchwork Lab: Gemology! Be sure to check our PreQuilt shop and all of these talented designers out!
As a quilter and maker, you can sign-up for a free (or upgrade to a Basic Account) and start visualizing your amazing designs in PreQuilt before ever cutting into your fabric. Because we all have precious fabric that is no longer in production, our motto is “PreQuilt twice, cut once!”
Envelope designed by PreQuilt
The free PreQuilt account gives you access to most of the PreQuilt features. If you upgrade to the Basic PreQuilt account, you will have access to all our advanced features like saving 25 quilt designs, uploading printed fabric swatches, full access to the preloaded block library, HST fabric calculator, being able to save your custom designed blocks and much more!
Designed on PreQuilt
Would you like to learn more about PreQuilt in person? Great news! I’ll be teaching at Quilt Canada 2020 in Edmonton and I’ll be teaching two PreQuilt workshops and I’d love to see you there! Be sure to register to save a spot on January 15th.
Our PreQuilt mission to help you design quilts that spark joy and help you discover just how creative you really are. Please come visit us, we look forward to seeing what you create!
All the best, Laura & Gar