Quilt Assistant - A Free Downloadable Quilt Design Software

At our last Quilt Guild meeting before summer break, the guild needed someone to take on the responsibility for their newsletter which is published once every two months. No one seemed interested in taking on the responsibility and, being one of the newest members and never having seen their newsletter, I was a little unsure of what the post involved.

I raised my hand anyway, and was surprised by the sigh of relief around the room. There is a nugget of advice out there somewhere that says that the easiest way to become part of and be accepted into a group (guild in this case) is to volunteer for stuff no one else wants to do. I've published one newsletter and never was a truer piece of advice given. Everyone now loves me!

Quilt Guild Icon

The most challenging part of publishing the newsletter was to incorporate the guild's icon. One would think a block as simple as this icon would exist online somewhere, but no such luck. So I began looking around for a simple design tool and came across Quilt Assistant.

The software downloaded and installed without incident and its icon was placed on my desktop.

Quilt Assistant (QA) does two things well - design a quilt based on a picture and draft traditional quilt blocks quickly and conveniently. The software is accompanied by a well-written and easily understood tutorial which I didn't consult. I was able to navigate my way through and in a matter of 5-6 different screens, was able to reproduce the quilt block I needed.

Start Up Screen

After double-clicking the QA icon on the desktop, the start up screen appeared and I picked the second option Create a new blank project which took me to the Design function.

I reset the width and length to 9 inches and the next screen took me to a 9 X 9 inch design area.

9 x 9 inch Design Grid

Using the Straight Line tool in Design a grid was drawn. Using the X coordinate in the lower left corner, I drew a vertical line at 3 inches and 6 inches. Using the Y coordinate in the lower left corner, I drew a horizontal line at 3 inches and 6 inches.

Drew 3 Xes in Center Row

After that it was a matter of drawing diagonal lines through the center row to create 3 Xes.

Coloring Tool 

I switched from Design mode to Coloring mode and a color palette appeared.

White Areas Colored In

Using the white color, all the white areas were filled in.

Red Areas Colored In

Switched to the red color and filled in all the red areas and the exercise was completed successfully. Upon exiting the tool, it prompted me to save the project and the project can also be exported to other quilting tools like Electric Quilt (EQ).

It was most satisfying and a pleasure to work with Quilt Assistant. To top it all, it was free software...it couldn't get better than that!

Cheers everyone!