Fabric Savvy Secrets from Diane Harris

Easy ideas to make your quilts sing!

Over decades of making scrappy quilts with lots and lots of fabrics, I’ve learned some valuable lessons. I’ve boiled them down here. I hope they’ll be helpful!

SCALE

Scale is the word we use to describe the size of printed motifs. It really helps to use different sizes of prints in the elements of your quilt.

Here’s a block I colored in EQ8 using all smallish prints with densely packed motifs.

Do you see how there’s no breathing room? It feels closed in and crowded. It’s cramped. Watch what happens when I substitute prints in other sizes:

Suddenly it can breathe! I tried to keep the values similar but the other thing to notice is that the motifs aren’t so densely packed together in several prints:

The darkest one, the pink and orange crabs, the white print and the polka dots at the center all have SPACE between the motifs. So much breathing room! Look at them side by side:

I really love that dark print. I wondered about using it again toward the center of the block:

A good idea but I didn’t love this, so I kept fiddling. Fiddling is part of what makes good combinations, by the way!

Better but not there yet…

I liked that yellow green better, so this is where I landed:

Almost every print contrasts with (looks different from) its neighbors. This is a visually successful quilt block.

Here’s a look at the progression. Keep in mind that my goal was to use prints in different sizes, but the density of the motifs also came into play.

Remember to give your patchwork room to breathe: use different sizes of prints (scale) and prints with motifs less densely packed.

Using EVERYTHING together

Is that even possible? Does it look like scrap throw-up? I think I know the answer.

The secret to using a bunch of diverse prints together successfully without any unifying element is…

SIZE. It’s that simple.

When you cut fabric into small pieces, if they are small enough, you can combine everything and it will work. My Nine Patch Jambalaya is an example. By the way, here are my complimentary instructions for this quilt.

The largest patch in the quilt finishes at 1.5″. When the pieces are this small, nothing has a chance to draw attention to itself. Everything works.

Another example is Just Bricks, above. These patches finish at 2″ x 4″ and I think this is roughly the largest patch you can use and be successful with if you’re including everything. And it did need that border fabric to help it along.

Here’s an important truth for this kind of quilt:

Value is more important than color.

Value is the lightness or darkness of a fabric compared to its neighbors. In a quilt that includes everything, you can stop worrying about the color and just think in terms of darks, mediums and lights.

If you want something more controlled, check out the quilt that Marcia started in one of my online workshops. She brought it to her quilt guild when I presented there.

She used darks and mediums for the zigzags, and she kept her backgrounds all very light. Her fabrics are roughly the colors in the border print, but the value is more important than the color.

I don’t recall if she picked the border first and then decided on which scraps to use, or if she used scraps and then found a border that worked. But either way, I think it’s a fantastic quilt!

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