Thinking about Proportion and Scale

I was recently reminded of the importance of proportion and scale within an artwork.

I’ve been working with some fabric I printed with a garden screen as a stencil. That gave me lots of oval “bubbles” and I’ve been trying to stretch the fabric and see how many quilts I can get out of it. These were my starting fabrics.

This is the first quilt, Bubble Rap 1.

Next, I used the blue and yellow fabrics and made another quilt (not yet photographed.) I went to a retreat during the time I was quilting that piece and I took the scraps with me in hopes of starting a third one in the same colors. This time I knew it would need to be smaller, since I was getting low on bubble fabric. You can see that I’ve got my intended dimensions taped off in the photo below.

As usual, I started by putting my highest contrast fabric pieces in my desired focal point (i.e. off-center,) and then adding pieces around it.

It was coming along pretty well, I thought. I committed to the central section and pieced some of that together. But, I realized I’d need to make it smaller yet, and moved that tape in.

When I came in the next morning it hit me:

My trusty “bubbles” that added so much interest in the two larger quilts were now taking over. Do you see what I mean? I knew I’d need to cut down the pieces, even the ones that were already stitched.

About that time, I decided to make a 12 x 12 benefit quilt for SAQA, an organization to which I belong. I decided to use what I had already constructed/auditioned at the retreat. That really forced the proportion “conflict” into focus. I began to cut things up – especially those high contrast bubbles.

Here’s a sample of the 12 x 12 quilt in-progress. Look what happened when I cut up the bubbles and misaligned them. Wow! I never expected that. WAY more interesting than just blobs of brown.

And here it is, finished. I’m kind of in love with it. The smaller motifs and pieces of fabric were absolutely necessary to keep the eye moving at this scale.

You can probably guess the title: Bubble Rap 3. This piece was very fun. Maybe I’ll aim for more like this.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. BTW, this quilt will be auctioned off in the fall. I’ll tell you about it when the time comes.