Have you heard of Prequilt?

 I intend to get three stroller quilts pieced this afternoon but I couldn't shut down my computer without passing this new discovery along.  I often see patterns on the internet that I want to make and I can usually recreate the pattern by just dissecting the blocks and drawing them out in my gridded quilt planner.  There is software available to do this called EQ but it's pricey at $330 CAD so I am still drawing everything out with a pencil (or pen if I am feeling confident) in my planner.

But I've just discovered another option when I was having a look at Karen Brown's Stashbuster quilt patterns which all come with Colouring Pages.  One click led to another and I ended up at the website for Prequilt.  Here is the link to the demo version which is free.  if you click on the Learn Block Editor link at the bottom left you will find the tutorial.  

I would definitely want to explore this on a desktop/laptop computer and think you would need to be pretty comfortable with computers to find this useful.  Dotty showed me how to do all this using the drawing feature in Word.  I could even scan my fabrics and use the scans to fill in the units in the blocks.  But using software designed for that purpose is a lot quicker.  I avoided a big mistake in a Christmas quilt I designed this way when I discovered the gold fabric I had chosen to use in one of the blocks completely overwhelmed the quilt.  Not easy to see when you are just looking at yardage.