Saturday, February 19, 2011

The Happy Accident

As I often discover in the midst of working with designs for quilts or art quilts, an accident, mistake, or total disaster can be turned into something that is just as good or even better than what you had in mind in the first place!

When I was creating the design layout for the quilt I posted the other day, I accidently clicked the wrong button in EQ7 (Electric Quilt) and every other row of the blocks shifted one column to the left. After I exclaimed in dismay at my mistake, I took a second look and said "Hmmmmm. Nice." So I saved that design for later before I went back to recreating the first design.

But that wasn't the only oops that resulted in my next quilt. While cutting out the white blocks, I forgot to account for the seam allowance in my measurement, and of course, I didn't think of this until I had already cut out all of the white blocks! So now I had this stack of blocks that were half an inch to short.

So when I returned to my accidental design, I just decreased the height of one of the strips of fabric that made up the colored blocks by half an inch. To then make it appear that this was my intention all along, instead of having purely a gradation of blues in the block, I decided to use at least one blue fabric with some yellow in it and then the smaller strip piece would be a yellow fabric.

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This is another queen size quilt destined for a bed in one of our inn guest rooms.

2 comments:

Patty Ashworth said...

It's not an accident or a mistake. It's a creative decision! I love those! You discover interesting things along the way!

Kim Marguerite said...

Yes, love those "creative decisions". It's one of the reasons I enjoy doing scrap quilts using JUST the scraps I already have - it make me think of color combinations that I might not have ever used before. It forces you to think not just of contrast in terms of light and dark but also color and hue. Hey, I just like playing with color! ;-)