Wednesday, December 24, 2008

More quilt talk


I'm still quilt scheming. Now that I've chosen a pattern, and come up with some general color ideas, now it's time to find the fabric. I'd like to stick with solids, but would like to throw in a few solids that have a very subtle pattern--like tonal stripes, or maybe a solid with different colored warps and wefts to give extra color depth. I'm fairly sure that I won't find much I like at the local box fabric stores, so I'm looking online. It's so hard to compare colors and really understand what you'll be getting. Just now I came up with a little helpful trick to compare colors from online fabrics. If you have a Mac, you probably have a great little application called Grab (I think there is something similar on PCs as well). This allows you to take a screen shot to save as a TIFF or JPEG, and you can also use it to capture a selection or window. I use this frequently when I want to remember a particular image for later inspiration. Today I used Grab to capture a selection of each fabric I was considering so that I could move them around and compare them to see how they might look in person.

2 comments:

isolada. by design said...

Oh, wow. Fun and very useful tool. I've a PC, but may have to check out if I can find such a function.

It can be a little tricky shopping online until you become familiar with designers, for example, and their respective manufacturers. I get most of my fabric online and know who to go to for a certain "look," weight and weave. And it's always a total blast opening my package when it arrives conveniently at the door.

Sounds like you're enjoying this project and learning so much along the way. Continued good luck in finding your fabric. I'll be here to follow as you journey to the finished quilt of art.

Peace to you and yours into the new year!

Ana

ChezAristote said...

I can't wait to see pictures when you start cutting out!