I met LeAnn at the AQS Lancaster show last year. She stopped by the APQS booth and chatted about machines for a bit. LeAnn asked me if I would quilt an Amish sampler she and her daughter started when she was in fourth grade! Her daughter is about to graduate from college so LeAnn thought it was time to get this quilt finished. LOL! I work with a lot of newbie longarm quilters and I thought it might be helpful to use LeAnn's quilt as a case study. I thought you might enjoy seeing how I work through a custom quilting job and what rabbits I chase and how I narrow down the design approach. The first thing I did was to float some design ideas past my client. In order to do this, I created a notebook in Evernote for her. She weeded out the ones she didn't like and left the ones that she and her daughter thought would look nice on their quilt. You can take a look at her design notebook here. Take a look and see which ones you'd select. She was very firm about using no floral/butterfly/super girlie designs. If you'd like to know more about Evernote you can read about how I rely on Evernote to keep my creative designs organized. It is a free web based application and is really awesome. This is a four part Design Case Study. You can see part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here.