So here’s the question: Are crafters who are making things for their family and friends that are not to be sold obligated to respect copyrights on designs the same way profit-driven manufacturers are? Before you answer, think about it from one designer’s perspective.

My husband and I design and make quilts for a living. It takes a long time to develop each design, not to mention all of the years of education that went into learning how to design. As is the case with any designer, we need these designs to pay for our mortgage, health insurance, groceries and deposits to our daughter’s college fund. Each design is worth thousands of dollars to us in potential royalty payments and commissions. Once we let someone copy a design, we have no control over who sees it and what happens to it. These designs have very real monetary value to us so we have copyrighted them. In our minds inspiration and color combinations are free for the taking but designs should be protected.

Soon after we started our company it became clear that hobby quilters liked our designs and wanted to reproduce them. We didn’t want anyone else to reproduce the designs for the quilts we made for our clients because we wanted to have some designs that would be made only by us. It’s kind of like a chef who wouldn’t want to publish every single recipe she develops. We want to keep some things exclusive to our studio. So we decided to design new patterns that would be available to hobby quilters who wanted to purchase patterns. We published two books with patterns, developed our own pattern line and often sell the rights to some of our designs to American Patchwork & Quilting Magazine so they can be reproduced by hobby quilters who want to make contemporary quilts.

A year ago a quilt that we made and sold to a collector appeared on the cover of a design magazine. The magazine credited us as the designers of the quilt. Since then we’ve had hundreds of calls from people who want to make that quilt and others that have appeared in magazine spreads that have featured our work. This leaves us in the awkward position of having to tell people that these patterns are not available for reproduction. The person always explains that they will not be selling the quilt, only making it for themselves or someone else. Their reasoning seems to be that if they are not receiving money from copying one of our patterns that there would be no loss incurred by us, which is not the case. Each person who asks assumes that they are the only one who is asking and thus it shouldn’t be a big deal to just let them copy a design, just for them, just this once.

An intellectual property attorney who is also a quilter once told us that it’s hard for quilters to understand and value the concept of intellectual property. She explained that because so many traditional patterns are in the public domain (not protected by copyrights), most quilters don’t see why all patterns shouldn’t be available to copy as easily as those that are not protected by copyrights. The believe that everything should be up for grabs to hobby quilters and that copyrights should not apply to people who aren’t selling things. Many people think that it’s wrong for a big profit-hungry corporation to knock off a designer but they don’t think there’s any harm in individuals knocking off designers because the individuals aren’t planning on making money from the designs they knock off. What they don’t see though, is that they are taking something from a designer. They are taking ideas and techniques, which are the livelihood of designers. This is less a legal issue to me than an ethical one.

The irony is that if designers let everyone reproduce designs that have not been released as patterns, the designers would have no designs left to sell, so they would no longer have a company, so they could no longer develop the designs that the crafters want to copy. When we ask people not to copy a copyrighted design that we want to keep exclusive to our studio, we’re not trying to be mean, we’re just trying to make a living and support our family. I know that imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but flattery will not pay for my daughter to go to college.

make it as fantastic as this one. A few years ago I got a tearful call from a friend of a friend who announced that she had a “quilting emergency.” Her brother had been a fan of the Grateful Dead (an American musical group that toured for 30 yrs) and had made his living tie-dyeing t-shirts, which he sold at Grateful Dead concerts. He had died unexpectedly at a young age leaving behind three small children. His sister had volunteered to take his hand-dyed shirts and make a t-shirt quilt for his children but she had never made a quilt before.

She asked us for design advice, technical assistance and the use of our long-arm quilting machine so the finished quilt would be sturdy. The woman and her mother took turns lovingly and tearfully quilting it on our machine and we were so glad to put our technical skills and machine to use for such a wonderful project.

That’s the thing about t-shirt quilts. If they’re made with really fun, sturdy t-shirts in a simple design, they bring back wonderful memories and are soft and comfy. The problem is that many t-shirt quilts are made with tattered t-shirts with crumbling silkscreens and aren’t worthy of the time that goes into them. The quilt is only as nice as the t-shirts that they’re made from. The other real success in this quilt is the design–there’s no sashing that frames each of the quilts in a box so the composition is much more dynamic than most t-shirt quilts that are laid out in a grid.

Below are some links to resources for making t-shirt quilts.

HGTV’s Simply Quilts t-shirt quilt instructions

PSHQuilts basic t-shirt quilts instructions

The technical advice is good but I’d simplify the design more. Eliminate the sashing, carefully crop the images on the shirts and use a very lightweight fusible interfacing. Try to play around with the sizes and proportion of the blocks and don’t try to add any pieced quilt blocks or large-scale fabrics in there. They will be too visually distracting. If for some reason you need to use other fabric, try a solid that will keep the focus on the graphics in the t-shirts not a busy pattern on the background fabric. It’s all about the memories of the t-shirts–everything else is a mere distraction. I knew that the Grateful Dead quilt was perfect when I realized that by just looking at the quilt made from man’s t-shirts I immediately felt as though I knew him, even though we never met. That’s one amazing quilt.

There’s a new environmentally friendly quilting batting on the block called Eco-craft. It’s made from corn (I know–corn?) but looks in every other way like polyester batting. Mountain Mist, the manufacturer of Eco-craft, and The International Quilt Study Center are hosting a competition using all natural materials. I’d love to hear from anyone who has actually quilted with it.

There are also some new offerings from Quilter’s Dream, the makers of my favorite batting. There’s a new polyester batting called Dream Puff that the manufacturer claims is warmer than down. Given that I live in Chicago which sees its share of cold weather, I’ll be trying this one out as soon as I can and will report back. I’m already a huge fan of their cotton and wool batting, both of which can be machine washed and dried. The really great thing about Quilter’s Dream batting is the soft drape that it gives to the quilt.

I admit that I can’t stand plastic shopping bags. I don’t like the sound of them, the feel of them, the effects they have on the environment, the way they get caught in trees or become bothersome to wildlife. I’m a cloth shopping bag girl from way back. They’re stashed in the car, on my bike, and even in my luggage when I travel. Even our 6-year-old daughter has her own cloth bags (shown above made with fabric designed by Jane Sassaman) for books, games and snacks.

So I was really excited to read about morsbags‘ efforts to organize groups of people, known as “pods,” to make cloth shopping bags from any kind of fabric available and hand them out at grocery stores around the world. Morsbags has a nice animated tutorial for making simple bags. In future posts I’ll include tutorials for various types of bags that I’ve found useful including shoe bags for travel, a child’s tote bag and a large heavy-duty tote bag for hauling books to and from the library. A friend and I have allocated one canvas bag for trading magazines back and forth between our houses before they get recycled. Show me your bags. I’d love to see ‘em.

I received last week a copy of the book that features the quilts that were selected in Quilt National 2007. I opened the box with excitement as one of my quilts was accepted in the competition and therefore would appear in the book. So I thought I’d write a review not just of the book but also about the quilts that will appear in the show that will tour the US for the next two years and of the experience of being in the show.

Over the years I have had mixed feelings about Quilt National. While I am deeply appreciative that there exists a high-caliber, contemporary, international quilt show, I have often thumbed through previous years’ books and not purchased them because I was not inspired by enough of the quilts. I’m not as interested in surface design as the jurors and some of the pieces appear to have been embellished to death. In some years, subtlety and craftsmanship seem undervalued.

There have been in each show, however, a handful of quilts that take my breath away. I mean, really amazing quilts that I would never have seen were it not for Quilt National and for that I am deeply grateful. These quilts stay in my memory for years and I have learned a great deal from them. Even though I disagreed with many of the selections for the show, I greatly admire Quilt National and am honored to have had a quilt chosen for it.

Having had three books published I knew that colors in the printing process are hard to control and that errors often creep into books at the last minute. At FunQuilts, we have had so many mixed experiences with having our work photographed that twice in the last year we have sent handwritten thank-you notes to photographers who have done an exceptionally good job at a magazine or newspaper. I know it’s hard. The thing that made me nervous was that as a part of the competition you have to sign away rights to the image of your quilt. This was new territory for me and while I wasn’t thrilled about it I wanted to try to have a quilt in the show so I signed on the dotted line.

So when I opened the book and found that my quilt had not been hung straight so the stitching is a bit off and that the only image of it that appeared in the book was cropped, I was mystified. If you see it in the book, the stitching should be straight and the top has been chopped off so the proportion is misleading. But they got the color right.

There are three quilts in the book that have been cropped. It looks as though a couple of others have detail shots overlaid on them. And yes, there are some breathtaking pieces in the book that make the book worth the price. So here’s my advice to aspirants: If you are required to sign away your rights to an image of your art, ask if you can approve the image before it’s published. It only seems fair that if you can’t use the image yourself, you should at least be able to approve how your work is being portrayed.

All in all I’m still thrilled to have a quilt in the show, but the whole experience kind of reminded me of my high school prom–I was so excited to be asked but in the end the fantasy was better than the reality.

As an exploration when teaching, we often hand students two fabrics that don’t “go together” with the assignment that they need to add as many fabrics as necessary to tie them together. Students are often dismayed at the original pairings but are always astonished at how adding others to the mix can transform a yucky combination into something really unexpected and wonderful. The goal is to get them to look beyond predictable color combinations.

So I was delighted to see that Pat Sloan at started a color challenge. Her structure is different from ours but sounds like fun and is sure to encourage quilters to broaden the color horizons.

For residents of the US, a three-part program entitled “Craft in America” airs tonight on your local PBS station. I have not seen the program yet but am excited about the prospect of a three-part documentary on craft followed by an associated two-year, eight-city museum tour and a companion book with a prologue by longtime craftsman, craft advocate, former president of the United States and personal hero of mine, Jimmy Carter. For those of you who do not live in the US or who miss the program, the website offers a DVD and links ot other resources. There’s also a preview of the program that can be seen online.

Seems like a simple enough task to choose a thread color for making a quilt. That is until you choose the wrong color and it becomes painfully complex to deal with. The navy thread looks like black next to the white. The orange thread peaks out between the pieces. The pale pink thread looks white next to the darker pinks. Here are some guidelines that we’ve developed over the years that may help.

For piecing, “Split the Difference and Blend.” Choose a thread that is halfway between the lightest and darkest fabrics in the quilt. If you have a multicolored quilt try a taupe or gray thread. Look for the most neutral color you can find and look at a single strand of it on the fabric. Remember that thread looks very different on the cone than it does as a strand. Bear in mind that fabric often looks darker once stitched so test a few on scraps before you commit to the whole thing.

For quilting, think about the role of the quilting. Should it contrast with the fabric to add visual interest? Would you prefer that it disappear because the piecing or fabric is visually complex? How about the backing? How will it look on the back? When machine quilting, some people advocate using different threads on the back and front. I think this works if they are pretty close in hue or value but I’ve had really bad results if they’re too different. It can look really messy as every little change in tension and be distracting. If you have big areas of a single color you can switch threads as well. Many of our quilts have long thin (less than an inch wide) elements in them of contrasting colors. I frequently leave these unquilted.

Consider also the difference in the fiber content of the thread and how the thread is going to lie on the fabric once quilted. Cotton threads tend to be thicker than polyester blends and make the quilting more obvious. In general I match the fiber content of the thread to the fabric I’m using, so I generally use cotton thread for all piecing and quilting. Sometimes, however, I just can’t find the right shade in cotton and I piece with polyester, but it’s not ideal.

Before you make your final thread choice, audition a thread color that you would never have thought would look good just to see what it would look like. About seven years ago someone rented our long-arm quilting machine to quilt a quilt with peacock blue and green fabrics. She chose a golden yellow that I would never have chosen, but it looked fantastic and totally transformed the quilt.

If you haven’t seen the new website sponsored by American Patchwork & Quilting you are in for a treat. Although the site is new and still evolving, the most helpful thing I’ve found so far is the video for learning how to bind a quilt. While this method differs from the method I use, it is the most common method of binding and beginning quilters will find it especially helpful. While I’ve seen other step-by-step tutorials on binding, the video format is so much easier to follow than text.

A Whiptips post from Reese Dixon about her log cabin quilt that looked like a swastika once pieced, was a reminder of the importance of testing a pattern BEFORE you cut out all of the pieces. I know, I know, I know. You finally have fabric you like and a pattern you can’t wait to make so you’re dying to get going and you just want to cut it all up and sew it together. Resist the urge. Test it first.

Some people advocate using graph paper and colored pencils to test how a design will look. I think it’s a lot more practical, especially if you are using patterned fabric, to use a digital camera, a color copier or scanner. Here’s what you do: Cut up just enough fabric for one block or a small section of the quilt. Using a digital camera, color copier or scanner, print out several versions of the block and arrange them as you intend to in the quilt. You might also find that you want to adjust the scale of the block or its arrangement. This is the time to make those adjustments. Follow the Ten-Foot Rule looking at it from ten feet away to see how the colors work and if any awkward patterns (such as swastikas) are forming. This may seem like a time-consuming step but what it takes in time it saves in heartbreak.

Here’s the final quilt as it appeared in American Patchwork & Quilting in June 2006.

The first letter I ever remember receiving was a beautifully illustrated letter from my grandmother that combined words and homonyms that were illustrated. There was a picture of a deer and then my name which as a 9-year old I understood as Dear Weeks. There were so many other charming picture and word combinations that I remember crying when I found out someone had thrown it away. Another of my favorite letters is one I received from a friend right after the September 11th terrorist attacks in the US. In lieu of the beautiful handmade Christmas cards he usually makes, he wrote individual letters to everyone he loved telling us what they meant to him and what he had learned from each of us. I was so touched by the letter I received that I read it over and over.

This is why I was excited to learn of Felicia Sullivan’s new challenge to encourage letter writing. For me the process of writing a letter is a bigger commitment of time and energy so I think more carefully about what I’m going to say. I don’t want the letter to look sloppy so I have to slow down so my penmanship conveys the sincerity of my thoughts.

The most meaningful letters I exchange right now are with the foster family in China who took care of our adopted daughter for the first 300 days of her life. They write to us once every year or two in Chinese and we have a friend translate their letter to us and our letter back to them. Although someone else has to write the Chinese part, I save the English translation and the English version of the letter I write in a handbound book so we have a record of our correspondence. Usually we send a small photo album with pictures of our daughter and have our daughter, who is now 5 write a sentence or two and draw a picture. I cherish each of the letters we receive as well as those we send because I know their family will open our letters with as much excitement as we open theirs.

Whether or not you participate in this letter-writing challenge, I hope you will take a moment and write someone a letter this week–not just so they can receive it but also because it feels so good to send it.

When I graduated from graduate school my parents asked me what I wanted as a graduation gift, “More design education!” I answered. So I signed up for a week at the Maine Photographic Workshop. It was like summer camp for grown-ups wanting to learn various aspects of photography. All we did all day was take photos, develop film and print. I loved the total immersion.

When we started FunQuilts, we decided to create a similar immersive environment for quilters. One week–totally focused on quilt design. There are lots of one-week summer programs in the US so I thought I’d post information about a few I’ve heard about. Some of the classes offer housing and meals and others refer you to local inns and restaurants.

Arrowmont offers courses in basket-weaving, clay, fiber, metals, drawing, woodturning and stone carving. Penland has classes in book-making, clay, drawing, glass, iron, photography, printmaking, and wood. Sievers has classes in weaving and quiltmaking (one of which is taught by one of our students). The Maine Photographic Workshop has classes in everything from basic black and white photography to operating very expensive cameras used for making movies and even courses in lighting. There are a number of classes and travel opportunities offered by Shaw Guides.

For quilters, Empty Spool Seminars offers classes in California by well-known quiltmakers traditional and contemporary. We will be teaching this summer at Quilting in the Pines near the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Quilting by the Lake in Upstate New York and at our own Design Camp in Chicago (which is almost sold out).

Perhaps readers in other countries could post information about similar classes in other countries.

I grew up in a time when kids were divided up pretty much in kindergarten into the kids who could draw well and those who couldn’t. I fell into the latter category. In graduate school I was determined to overcome my insecurities about this and devoted myself daily to improving my drawing.

A year ago when we were planning our fabric line that came to be called Mendhi, my husband Bill and I decided we would try to combine hand drawing and a layering process in Photoshop to create a rich, collage-like print. I was more than a little scared to stake a fabric line on my drawing skills but decided that it was time to get over it already. Bravely I hand drew the elements and Bill took the lead on layering. It took both of us to color the 28 prints because some patterns used 16 colors. We spent months designing this line. When we received the sample fabrics we were thrilled as they looked exactly how we imagined they would. The D1600 series (the wildflowers) we loved the most. We both declared that we would make shirts of those fabrics some day. D1604-632 was supposed to be made into curtains for our daughters room.

One month after the fabric came onto the market, a quilt made with this fabric appeared on the cover of American Patchwork & Quilting. For about 6 weeks we received 20-30 orders a day for this fabric. When we called Westminster (the new parent company of FreeSpirit fabrics, which had originally printed the line) to order more fabric, we were told that despite the fact that the line was selling out quickly, Westminster decided to discontinue production just two months after the line came on the market. We bought all of the remaining inventory and began to fill the 500+ orders we had. We knew that we were running out of fabric and it was hard to decide whether we should keep some for ourselves, but in the end we didn’t. Everyone who called seemed so excited about it that it was hard to hold anything back. This morning I cut the last piece of D1600-411, the fabric I had planned to make a shirt with. Bill and I were so sad. While we’re excited that the fabric was so well-received and has been shipped all over the world, it is sad to see a fabric we worked so hard on have such a short life. We know there will be more lines but I miss this one already.

The response to my post You Show Me Your Heart And I’ll Show You Mine was astonishing. I received so many requests from worthy charitable projects from around the world. With the help of a wonderful student who is also a retired social worker, we sent out 7 large envelopes of fabrics to addresses around the world and have a few more that are awaiting addresses.

Now it’s your turn. If you have crafts supplies that you would like to donate to a worthy charity, consult the list on dotdigital. Feel free to post here the email addresses or website of other charitable organizations needing craft supplies and contact them directly.

Thanks for all of your inspiring work.

Happy Valentine’s Day! So here’s my valentine to whipup’s readers: free fabric for a good cause. Post a request for the fabric you need to complete a project for a charitable cause. Tell me a little about the project and what you need. For example, “I need a yard each of red, blue and yellow fabrics to make a raffle quilt for our son’s school. His teacher’s are so great and the proceeds are going to buy books for the library,” or something like that. Give me some guidance about general colors, (specific colors, pastels or brights, multicolored prints, or you can just say “send me a nice palette of five fabrics with total yardage of 5 yds”) and I’ll send you what I can. You may receive scrap yardage but it will be high-quality quilting cotton and will look good together. We’ll choose the requests that best match up with the inventory we have. Be sure to tell me how receiving this fabric will benefit the community or a charitable organization. We’ll even pay for shipping anywhere. So get going!

During the week the phone rings too frequently to listen to anything that requires concentration while I design or sew. But we here in Chicago are lucky enough to have the greatest Saturday line-up on our local public radio station. My idea of a really wonderful Saturday is being in the studio working on a quilt while listening to This American Life, a beautifully written radio show of stories from various contributors. Despite the title of the show, listeners will find that the subjects of the stories translate nationality. These are sometimes moving, sometimes funny, always memorable stories about human beings and their foibles. There are times, I confess, when I laugh so hard that I have to put down my rotary cutter for fear of losing a finger. If you have not discovered this program, download one episode and you’ll be hooked.

The other podcast I listen to regularly while I’m making things is CraftSanity. If you are new to this site or the CraftSanity site, you will find WONDERFUL interviews with Whipup’s fearless leader Kathreen, and contributors past and present including Alicia Paulson, Drew Emborsky and me. Jennifer is a talented interviewer and her longer format allows for more in-depth interviews.

Please post your favorite podcasts, downloadable radio programs and other spoken word pieces that can be downloaded via the internet.

I once heard an editor of a cooking magazine say that she was always debating in her mind whether her magazine should reflect the taste of their readership or lead it. It’s no secret that the image on the front of a magazine dramatically affects the sales of the magazine, so it was with nervous excitement that we waited to see the response to the latest issue of American Patchwork & Quilting.

On the cover of the just-released April issue is Spice Market, a contemporary quilt designed and made by us with our latest line of fabric. There is also a 5-page article on FunQuilts, which is the nicest piece anyone has ever written about us in the magazine. There are also beautiful pictures of our studio. When this came out last week, we wondered how APQ’s readership would respond. By putting a modern quilt on the cover of a magazine with a traditional base readership, was APQ reflecting its readership or leading it? Would it attract any new readers?

APQ listed our phone number and website so readers could purchase the fabrics used to make the Spice Market quilt. This is especially helpful to readers because it is so hard to track down all 13 fabrics used in the quilt, especially if you are making a large quilt and need lots of yardage from the same bolt.

So far daily traffic to our website has tripled and the phone is ringing constantly. The big surprise is that the demographics of the callers is so different from what we expected. We’re getting calls from octogenarians and bloggers, wives whose husbands especially like the quilt, moms who are making the quilt for their college-bound children and young, beginning quilters who are attracted to the simple construction. In the US we’ve received calls from Washington State to Florida, with both urban and rural post office box mailing addresses. We also have received calls from Canada. Our website statistics show us that there are times when groups of people all from the same server are on our website at the same time. We envision co-workers on a break looking at our website.

What we’ve learned this week is that the divisions between traditional quilters and contemporary quilters aren’t as clear-cut as we thought.

Finally, the editors of American Patchwork & Quilting have agreed to let me interview them about their magazine, what’s new in quilting and any other questions whipup’s readers would like to submit. They really want to know what interests you, so post your questions here, I’ll forward as many as I can, and get you some answers.

In our writing and teaching Bill and I try to convey the meaning behind certain colors and combinations of colors. We each have associations with colors that we’re not aware of most of the time. Understanding that colors create moods is helpful when you are selecting materials for any craft project. I was really excited to come across two very different resources that express very differently the associations we have with color.

Hailstones and Halibut Bones is a charming and thought-provoking book for children and adults alike given to our daughter by one of our thoughtful students. The author writes poetically about the smell and sound of a color as well as the emotive qualities. It has sparked so many interesting and imaginative discussions with my 5-year-old daughter that I think it should be in every family library.

Color in Motion is a mesmerizing piece of animation that conveys with wonderful form as well the associations many of us have with color. It’s so brilliantly done, features text in English and Spanish and is wonderfully accessible to adults and children alike. There are words that we associate with each color as well as a movie about each color that you will want to show to everyone who you can drag over to your computer. Follow the directions because you won’t want to miss a second.

Two friends and I volunteered to make some animal costumes for the annual Epiphany Pageant at our church performed by children ranging from ages 3 to 5. These needed to be simple costumes that would fit a variety of heights and weights and be simple enough that the kids could slip them on and off by themselves. We worked on the sheep. Here’s how we cranked out 10 sheep costumes in a day.

I went to two different fabric stores to look for berber fleece or any other kind of sheep-like material. Our community is proud of its racial and ethnic diversity so we decided that the sheep shouldn’t all look the same. As a result I decided to buy as many different, sheep-colored types of fleece as I could find.

We made muslin patterns of a vest we chalked by sight, which we later tested on my daughter who is 5 (that adorable girl shown above). She would be the largest possible user. Someone else had a generic animal hood pattern which we made a muslin of as well. We tested the hood as well before we cut out the rest. With the costumes so simple I thought it really important to get the details right.

Being a city dweller I decided to Google images of sheep to look at the placement of the sheep’s ears. When you stop laughing at this you will acknowledge that the placement of the sheep’s ears really is critical to making them look convincing. I noticed that the location of the ears should be just above the line that would be made if you connected the eyes. If I had put the ears on top, the costume would have looked like a dog. The hard-core designer in me decided that the ears needed to be flesh-colored on the interior, so I combed my solids for the perfect shade of fleshy pink. This small detail really makes the whole costume I think. All I have to do now is sew some velcro tabs for the chin strap.

When working with furs of any type use the overlock stitch on your machine on all seams. If your machine doesn’t have overlock, use a wide zigzag. If the fur begins to shed as soon as you cut it, overlock or zigzag all raw edges before you sew the pieces together. Give them a good shake outside before you put them on the child to get rid of any loose fur. If time had not been so much of an issue or if these costumes were going to get more than 1 hour of wear a year, I would have lined them. The most important thing is that the children are comfortable. On the day of the pageant I was heartened to see one little boy stroking his costume over and over again because it felt so good.

In the past few years several fabric designers have released lines of fabric featuring large-scale prints in beautiful colors. While these fabrics are fun to use for projects that only require one or two fabrics, quiltmakers are always trying to figure out how they can incorporate these fabrics into their quilts. "I love this fabric but I don't know how to use it," is a comment we hear a lot. We wanted to play around with these fabrics ourselves so we made the quilt shown above to brighten up our bedroom in the grayness of winter. In the process of working with these fabrics, we learned a lot. So here are a few guidelines for making quilts with large-scale prints.

Understanding Figure/Ground

As a general rule, use simple quilt designs for complex fabrics and reserve complex quilt designs for simple fabrics with smaller repeats and less contrast. Using large-scale contrasting prints is harder to make work because of a design principle known as Figure/Ground.

In Figure/Ground, the “figure” refers to a design motif or pattern on the fabric while “ground” refers to the background upon which the figure is placed.

Use fabrics of different scales

When you cut up small-scale fabric, the shape of the piece is larger and more dominant to the eye than the shape of the figure on the ground. When you cut up a large-scale print, the size of the figure often competes with the size of the piece, making it hard for the viewer to see the pattern of the quilt. You can’t see the pattern for the fabric, so to speak.

The human eye understands patterns as a result of visual hierarchies. When the hierarchy is unclear in some places and clear in others, the eye stays in one place trying to make sense of the mess.

The larger-scale prints will always have ambiguous edges when cut up, but placing these pieces next to smaller-scale pieces with clean edges will improve the visual clarity of the quilt.

Consider the contrast

Another thing to keep in mind is the level of contrast in the fabric. The higher the contrast between the figure and the ground, the harder it’s going to be to see the shape of the quilt piece. Use fabrics with higher contrast with those with less contrast to balance the visual impact.

More might be better

With the eye always trying to sort out visual hierarchy, a single large-scale print can look much larger than the same print does when combined with a bunch of other large prints. When we were auditioning fabrics for this quilt, we found that adding lots of other large-scale prints made each individual print seem less dominant.

It’s kind of like a party

In the end, think of a large-scale print as a gregarious friend at a social gathering. One or two really loud people in a room discourages interaction between others. But if you have a whole group of people with various personalities with none dominating, then you really have a party.