How do you design a quilt...or create an idea for your quilt?

[coffeebreak]

someone asked somewhere how we all design our quilts. I am a visual person...I have to have pictures...forget the words..give me pictures! But although I intend to buy a tablet of graph paper, in the meantime..I just use a spril notebook, (keeps it all together anyway, might just stay with this way!) and literally draw the quilt. I lay the fabric out on the table, overlaping and such and once I get the colors the way I want, then I sketch it with markers. This time I was designing the borders of my quilt...so I just drew the squares on the page. Now, today, and I didn't take pic...I was sketching out the mddle part of the quilt with is mostly strips....and I just made colored lines. It has worked well so far...I have sketched 3 like this so far..no, that'd be 5 as I did skecth the t-shirt quilts I just finished also.

It is also nice this way as I have the paper right there to start keeping track of my measurements and make my own instruction page...so if I want to use that pattern again, I have the measurements already. I just have to change color/fabric. Right now, I am making the Strawberry Shortvcake quilt one step at a time...I cut the middle and then added the first round of strips. Then I go measure and cut the next round of strips and so on. This way, as opposed to cutting all strips at the same time.

But...how do you design your quilt if you don't have a pattern? How do you "make them up"?