While putting away fabrics, I noticed a large number of muted fabrics. (That is, more muted than the saturated colors I typically use.) I auditioned them all together and thought it would be fun to work with them.
I took those fabrics to a retreat and started making decisions. My idea was to audition various fabric combinations and to come up with pleasing proportions before cutting the first piece.
I was using a portable design wall on an easel. A little wobbly, but acceptable.
I paid careful attention to the proportions of each color. For instance, the red-orange near top center in the photo above looks pretty strong, and maybe even out of place. But, when used in a smaller amount, it looks like a nice accent. See the photo below.
There are several fabrics that were down sized between those first two photos. See if you can find any others. (I spent several hours getting to this point.)
Once I decided on the palette, my next steps were pretty straight forward. I joined dissimilar fabrics into pairs. Then I altered each pair with a curvy cross seam, the addition of a skinny stripe, or some misaligned seams. The idea was to add energy and interest. It didn’t require a lot of thought – yet.
After a while I began to join the pairs into larger units. This was often dictated by how well the shapes/sizes matched one another. Eventually, it had grown quite a bit and I had some interesting things happening. This is what it looked like when I got it home and first put it up on my design wall. (Ignore the blue stripe, which is for a different project.)
As I began to move the units around, temporarily, I saw that I had a horizontal composition. I wanted it to be more square, so I knew I’d need to make and add more pieces at the top and/or bottom.
In my next post I’ll show you what I tried.
Ellen Lindner