Size Matters (with prints, that is)
I recently started work on a fairly large quilt with colorful Croton leaves.
I auditioned fabrics that would help me achieve the striped effect of the heavily veined leaves.
Click any image for a larger view
Perfect, aren’t they?
Then, I drew one very large leaf onto muslin and cut it out as a base for the first leaf.
Great shape, right?
Then, I combined the two.
Ugh. That’s when the wheels came off the bus. Thankfully, I could tell right away that I had a problem, but it took me a little while to figure out why this was so bad. Can you tell?
The problem was the scale of the striped fabrics. They were just too small to work on this large scale. Although the stripes might work very well for a smaller leaf, they were actually an obstacle in this case.
Why didn’t I notice this issue when I auditioned the fabrics? Because my audition didn’t show them in the proper scale. A valuable lesson.
On to the next group of fabrics. (Hand dyes: MUCH better!)
Ellen Lindner
That is really interesting. That happened one time for me when I made a quilt of my parent’s house. I had to use some brick fabric and had to make sure that I got the right scale so it looked right. Luckily my first guess worked for scale, but not so much for color. I had to paint and tea dye the fabric to get the right color….an easy fix. Much better than having the right color, but bricks that are too large that look really dumb!
Hi Chris. It sounds like you handled those bricks very successfully.
For me, I find that this scale lesson is one I need to occasionally relearn. But, as is to often the case, I think my Plan B will be better than the orignal one!