Weeks

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.

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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.

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