Scale

As a quilter I am constantly learning, oftentimes by my mistakes. You know what? Learning by making mistakes is a time honored tradition, and possibly the best teacher of them all. 

The wedding quilt I've been working on ended up being one of those learning situations. I love log cabin quilts, but this is the first time I've made a curved log cabin. No problem, I drew it up on EQ 7, figured out the cutting plan, and finished the last of the blocks yesterday. Everything was going great until I started putting it up on the design wall. 

This was my original layout plan. This was supposed to be one quadrant of the quilt. It looks pretty good in the photo, but in person, the design was so large it was hard to see the design. I made the blocks 12", so this one floral design was 4 feet across. I decided to add another quadrant before I decided anything. 

Again, in the photo it looks ok, but in person, I realized I was completely losing the design. I realized when the quilt was on a bed, most of each design would be hanging off the side of the bed, so it really wouldn't show. I realized that the scale was all wrong for the design to really show up. I had planned 12" blocks, set 8x8. This layout would have worked out much better had I planned 8" blocks set 12x12, and the quilt would have been exactly the same size. Instead of four huge floral motifs I would have had nine. I could have even opted to make 6" blocks and set them 16x16, and then there would have been 16 floral motifs. Both the 8" and 6" blocks would have been a better option. 

The thing is, the wedding is in July, and I don't have time to start again from scratch. I started looking up curved log cabin layouts, and saw several I liked, but a lot of them didn't work with my blocks. I have 32 blocks where the red logs are narrow and the white logs are wide, and 32 blocks where the red logs are wide and the white logs are narrow. A bunch of the layouts I saw required all the blocks to be the same. Rather than getting frustrated, I decided to just start playing with the blocks, and I ended up going for the simplest solution.

I found several layouts that would work with the blocks I had, but I thought this one packed the most visual punch. Each circle is 2 feet across, which is a better scale to use on a bed. 

I rarely work with blocks this large, so I'm not really that surprised I didn't take scale into consideration. I've made lots of huge quilts, but I rarely make a quilt block larger than 9". I've made plenty of large quilts with smaller than 9" blocks, but I just don't work large scale very often. 

The quilt has a completely different feel than my original intention. I think the circles look pretty modern. The couple getting married are young, freshly graduated from college, so modern may be a better option for them anyway. Good thing I never let a couple choose the quilt pattern or I'd be stuck, but in this case I didn't even let them choose the colors, I used their university colors. 

I still want to make a quilt with my original layout plan, but I'll be using smaller blocks for sure. I've got no time to work on a quilt like that anytime soon, but the idea is saved in EQ, so I can revisit it later. In the meantime, I've learned to keep scale in mind, and that's a good lesson to learn.