So I bought some fabrics to make a quilt for my mother for Christmas, but now I'm having trouble finding block or quilt patterns to go with them. Here are the fabrics:



The scales of the prints may be a little off as I scanned the fabrics then resized using GIMP, but hopefully you get the idea. I think the problem is that I decided these are Jane Austen-y, early-nineteenth-century prints and that they might not look good in a traditional American quilt block (like Ohio Star or whatever) and probably won't look good in a more modern design either. Another problem is that the fabrics are all really similar in terms of color value (which I realized when I was buying them but couldn't find any coordinating fabrics that were medium or dark), so any pattern that relies on a lot of contrast may not work well.

I hope some of you can help--I really don't want to start just cutting out 8" squares.

Thanks!

How would one go about making this dress?






As far as I can see, it has the following (relevant to me) features:

1. strapless with lace overlay on top
2. I really like the neckline (not straight across, not standard sweetheart neckline either)--anyone seen a similar pattern? Other than that, the dress part seems pretty basic.
3. no waist seam, regular waist and bust darts (i.e., not princess seamed) and appears to have side zipper
4. lace applied on bias (but how did they do it so the scalloped edge appears both where the lace ends below the waist, and also on the left side of the neck?)

Also, what kind of fabric does the body of the dress appear to be made out of? It's probably silk, but what kind?

Red and black (lacquer) was a big deco color combination: I found a few things doing a google image search for "deco dresser" and so on:




You could do black with another color also; I've seen deco furniture with lavender and black, for example. I'm envisioning the furniture as shiny black, with shiny red/other color as the inside and outside scallop-area on the armoire and dresser. Also, I agree about replacing the knobs. Just make sure they are the same size or you will have to drill new holes.

Since a lot of deco furniture features patterns made with inlaid wood, another option might be to paint the different sections to look like inlay:



I know I've seen tutorials on how to do this, but can't think of anything. That would be more work than I personally want to do, but it might look cool.

From the picture, it looked like the furniture might not be solid wood, in which case you'd have to primer it before painting or the paint won't stick. Sounds obvious, but my mother, queen of the half-assed, tried to paint over fake wood paneling once...

Contact paper is one option, but I think paint would be easier (no cutting), more attractive and longer lasting in the end. However, there might be attractive wood-grained contact paper now that would replicate the inlay look. I just went to Con-Tact's website and they have the following:



Available in other fake wood patterns/colors also. You could trace the shapes and cut them out at a diagonal. However, I don't know about doing the tops/side of the dresser and armoire in contact paper... Again, I think two-tone paint would be the easiest and least complicated.

I saw this thread and had to post a picture I found on www.uglyweddingdres s.net of an ugly peacock wedding gown, orignally from something called culture-shock.com.au. This, I guess, would be the tragic yet logical conclusion of your peacock theme if taken too far:



Don't get me wrong; I think your peacock feather idea is cute--I just thought you might enjoy the correlation

Use the following tags to post an image:

(img width=300 height=615)www.whatever.com/stuff.jpg(/img)

Except that you use square brackets where I used parentheses (if I typed the brackets, the tag wouldn't have shown up.
Then put the URL inside the tags without spaces. If you find a post with a picture, push the "quote" button and it'll repost the picture automatically using those tags so you can see how it works. If the proportions of the image aren't right, you can change them by typing in different numbers for the width and height.

Example:



How to post pictures is explained somewhere in the help section also.