A couple weeks ago our friend Pam (ours being yours and mine) came over to play. It was one of those mornings. She had tweeted she was unfocused or something of the sort, and I tweeted back, "come be unfocused with me" or something like that.

I had been contemplating starting a new quilt with my Paris Apartment fabric, but wasn't sure of my direction. But along came Pam and saved my day. With just a few hints and tips I was able to come up with a great new design.

Pam is not just a quilting genius, but she's also a computer whiz!

I've been working with Photoshop forever. Since the first version, I believe. But when Pam showed me how she was using it to design quilts, I wanted to bonk myself over the head! Why didn't I think of that? I've designed all of my quilts on photoshop, but not like this. On top of that, I knew how to do all of this, but never thought of it for quilt making. Seriously. It was Pam Kitty Genius! Create custom shapes and use them over and over for quilt blocks. I don't know what I was doing, but it wasn't easy, like this is. 

 

Above is the quilt I designed. (It will, of course, be a pattern shortly... as soon as I finish sewing it up and it's quilted...

...which is (ahem) what I should be doing now. Instead, I'm writing this post cause it sounded like fun.

Wanna' know how you do it?

You simply use the pen tool to create your shape.

 

The shape is a "path" that you can make a custom shape from.

Choose edit: define custom shape.

Now you have a custom shape you can choose to use however you want! 

When you chose the shape tool, this appears at the top of the screen. Just choose the blobby looking thing on the left, then you can pick your new custom shape from the drop down menu.

And voila!

This is one of my custom shapes!