Customise That Pattern

Often, you see a quilt pattern that you absolutely fall in love with, but it’s just not quite right for the quilt you had in mind to make next. Perhaps the colours clash with your home décor, or the size is too tiny for a bed quilt, or maybe you’re not sold on the layout. Does this mean it’s back to the drawing board, scouring the Make Modern pattern gallery, or spending hours browsing Pinterest? No, not necessarily! You have the power to adapt that quilt to perfectly meet your needs.

Remember this golden rule:

Also, remember this essential ethical note:

You can’t take ideas from someone else’s quilt and then market your own pattern from it. For the purposes of this article, we’re talking about adapting patterns for personal use only. We’re just here to help you make your dream quilt!

First things first, you need to work out what doesn’t quite work for you in the existing pattern. Is it the colour, the size, or the layout? Once you’ve pinpointed the sticking point, you can start to figure out what you’ll change to make it right for you.

If you’re making a quilt for someone else, you’ll definitely want to factor in their tastes and needs, a baby obviously needs a much smaller quilt than an adult bed quilt; and your colour scheme and style is likely to be completely different for your modern-minded bestie than it is for grandma.

Fabric is one of the most important elements of a quilt, and using different fabrics can completely change the entire look of a pattern. The great thing is: you can make your quilt in any fabrics you like!

A lot of patterns are released in solids because they’re timeless, giving them longevity in the marketplace. But just because a sample is made in solids, this doesn’t mean you need to ignore that beautiful stash of prints on your sewing room shelves.

• Solids to Prints: If you want to use one print for each solid colour, you absolutely can! Or you could even use a selection of prints in that colour for a gorgeous scrappy look.
• Keep it Consistent: If you’re going scrappy, make sure you’re consistent across all your colours. For example, if you have a rainbow quilt that uses the same amount of each fabric and you switch out solid pink for eight pink prints, then you also have to switch out all the other colours for the same or a similar number of prints. It would look a bit strange to have eight prints in one colourway and only two in another!
• Precut Swaps: If you love Fat Quarter bundles and the instant coordination they provide with little planning, it’s easy to take a pattern that uses a Fat Quarter bundle and substitute it with a similar sized bundle for a completely different look.

One thing to always keep in mind when you’re switching fabrics around is value and contrast.

1. Value Consistency: If the quilt pattern you choose used medium value colours (the middle tones), you either need to stick with that, or go consistently darker or lighter across the entire quilt.
2. Light/Dark Integrity: If the design makes use of lights and darks (high contrast) to create a specific visual effect (like a secondary pattern), you will need to follow this structure using your own lights and darks to get the same effect. If there is high contrast between different elements of the pattern, you need to follow this to maintain the design’s integrity.

Pro Tip: If you’re making a popular quilt (like a multi-block sampler from a book or a well-known pattern), search it up on Pinterest or Instagram to see what other quilters have done! Searching the pattern hashtag (if it has one) is a great way to find inspiration and see many ways to interpret a pattern.

The background fabric truly deserves its own mention because it can drastically alter the final look of your quilt.

• A dark background looks drastically different to a crisp white background.
• A scrappy selection of low volumes (subtle, light prints) blurs the edges and can soften the contrast between your main block and the background, giving it a gentle, romantic feel.

Crucially, contrast is important between the background and the feature fabric. If your fabrics are too close in tone and you lose that contrast, the blocks will not stand out against the background and the entire design will appear muddy or lost. Squint at your fabrics! If you can’t tell the difference in value when you squint, they are too similar.

Sometimes you fall in love with a design, but the colours are all wrong for you.

• Simple Swaps: If the quilt is a simple single- or two-colour design, switching them out is easy. It’s just a straight swap from one colour to another.
• From Multi to Mono: Changing a multicoloured quilt to a single colour scheme is also straightforward; you just need to replace all the colours for a single hue. To stop this from looking too ‘same-same’, you may want to make sure you have a range of lights, mediums, and darks; and different scale prints; in your fabric choices.
• From Mono to Multi: If you love a block pattern but the quilt sample is monotone, that doesn’t mean you can’t use a bunch of colours!
• Unifying Element: Having a unifying element, like a plain white background on all blocks, or the same colour square in the centre of each block, can help tie a vibrant quilt together.
• Coordinate Well: Alternatively, just pull the fabrics you want, making sure they coordinate well like you would with any quilt, and make a block from each fabric. As long as the fabrics work together, they should play nicely in a quilt.

When you’re looking at a pattern, take a look at what the existing colour scheme is, and try to mirror the colour relationship when you substitute fabrics. For example, if a quilt is primarily red, with aqua accents on a white background, you’re looking at a complementary colour scheme (red and green/aqua are opposites). If you switch the aqua for pink or orange, which is an analogous colour scheme (colours next to each other), it’s going to completely change the look of the quilt, which is okay, but might not be what you have in mind. Instead, try using mostly purple with a touch of yellow for another complementary colour scheme.

I like the Canva colour wheel tool (www.canva.com/colors/color-wheel) that allows you to pick a colour and then choose between complementary, monochromatic, analogous, triadic, and tetradic colour schemes. It’s a great way to test out new ideas before you cut any fabric!

You don’t have to make a quilt in the size the pattern says. There are a few easy ways to resize a quilt:

• Increase or Decrease the Number of Blocks: Work out what size each block is and how many you will need to make your desired sized quilt. This is the simplest option!
• Increase or Decrease the Size of Blocks: You can scale blocks up or down (using maths or a resizing tool) to change the overall scale of the quilt. For example, if a quilt has 16, 12” blocks in a four by four grid, you’ll have a 48” square quilt. Sizing each block up to 20” and keeping the layout the same would turn it into an 80” quilt.
• Add Negative Space: Make a quilt bigger by adding borders (or increasing their size). Your borders don’t have to be symmetrical. You could even make the quilt as per the pattern and add a wide border in the same background fabric on two sides to give the illusion of the quilt centre floating, which is a very modern look.

If you fall in love with elements of a quilt design, but the overall layout doesn’t work for you, you can absolutely change it around. This is a great way to give more traditional blocks a modern feel. You can:

• Change the way the blocks are laid out.
• Remove some of them for a more random or asymmetrical look.
• Remove borders or sashings completely.

Changing layouts is an easy way to give a quilt a whole new look without changing the piecing instructions.

If you decide you’re going to rework an existing pattern, it’s important you keep track of what you’re doing.

Print out your pattern (or photocopy it) so you have an extra copy to scribble all over. Work out the new maths carefully, note any fabric or colour changes, and draw diagrams for your new layout.

Keeping lots of notes is the key to not getting yourself totally lost and confused!

Now you’re ready to start making existing quilt designs completely your own. To get your creative juices flowing, why not dive into a past issue of Make Modern Magazine and pick a pattern to adapt! Our All-Access Subscription gives you instant entry to every issue so you have hundreds of designs to play with!

What pattern from our catalogue are you most excited to customise first?

This blog is an excerpt from Customise that Pattern by Jane Kelly from Issue 47.