36 free quilt blocks, one a week with a guide to Jane Austen's England and posts about the people in her life.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Other Color Ideas for an Austen Family Album


Austen Family patchwork in the collection
of the Jane Austen's House Museum at Chawton. 
Photos by Bettina Havig


 The center of the Austen diamond patchwork uses several chintzes, particularly some with a light to medium tan background called a tea ground at the time. One could use this period color scheme for the Austen Family Album blocks.

Read a post I wrote about the Austen patchwork here:

This second Georgian-era color idea focuses on deeper, richer colors than the pale pinks, blues and purples in last week's post. 




Chintzes with densely colored grounds were relatively new
in the early 19th-century.


Details from some online auctions.

Exotic birds and trees (arborescent prints) were a
fad in Jane Austen's time and you can see
scraps from these in the Austen patchwork's diamond center.

This piece with a panel of an actress mixes dark chintzes with spotted muslins---
 these are NOT the coarse muslin we're familiar with but a print on a higher grade of cotton weave.

A similar dark and light color scheme with
a panel picturing Caroline Princess of Wales,
the Regent's wife

Although you see blues, lilacs and pinks here, more dark brown and red prints make a higher contrast. 

The palette of darks and lights was also
popular in America.



For this scrapbag you'll need reproduction chintz-scale prints. 
I did a collection called Lately Arrived From London
few years ago in the American taste for English prints.



Look for lights and darks like these.



You can probably still find some Lately Arrived From London
online.


Becky Brown is going to do two sets of Austen Family Album blocks each week.


One will be in blues/tans and ivories.
She'll be using many reproduction prints so it will
have a period look combined with a 21st century update.

She'll also be sewing a set on the red side of the color wheel with some olive green and dark blues. The prints are from the new Ladies' Album reproduction collection I've done for Moda. The theme here is mid- to late-19th century but the colors didn't change too much from 1805 to 1890.

Yardage is in quilt shops now: April, 2014.

Read more about chintzes here
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2011/08/every-early-repro-collection-needs.html

And you can make your blocks in totally contemporary fabrics and color schemes too....

....Like Pip at Rest is Not Idleness
who is doing the Civil War era blocks
Threads of Memory in totally 21st century prints.

For more period prints see:

Moda's Collection for a Cause: Warmth
And the Mill Book Series. The new line is Collection: Mill Book Circa 1852

12 comments:

  1. Do you think your Modernism line would work well for the Austen Family Album blocks, or should I stick with Ladies Album? Opinions? I might not be able to keep up with this as I am currently working on 2 Dear Jane quilts, but I will eventually make it!

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  2. I have some chintzes ready -- going with the "darker" palette. I'm really looking forward to this series!

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  3. PinkD
    I'd love to see you use the modernism line. The blocks are just traditional blocks mostly four patch and nine patch variations so would work well with any prints or plains.

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  4. i would love to see these in the modernism line!

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  5. I used your Lately Arrived from London line to make "Darcy," a Schnibble pattern from Miss Rosie's Quilt Co. I thought it was the perfect fabric line to make a quilt named for the most famous Jane Austen character!

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  6. Combien de tissus différent faut-il prévoir? Et quel métrage de chaque?
    Merci de votre réponse.

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  7. Tissus et metrage: semaine prochaine.
    Ma francais: execrable

    Yardage for fabric: Nextweek.

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  8. Mon Anglais est pire!!!
    Merci pour la réponse.

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  9. I guess it will be very difficult to resist to the call of this Jane Austen Quilt.... this pastel colors are so romantic !

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  10. J'adore les personnages de Jane Austen! j'ai tous les livres et dvd! je participerai bien.

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  11. I am currently quilting my own 'After Jane' quilt hand pieced using a Jane Austen range of fabrics that came out a few years back. A kind and talented neighbour helped me to size a photo of the center block which I printed to replicate the chintz basket of flowers that Jane, her mother and sister used in their quilt

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  12. I LOVE your Ladies Album fabrics and want to make the blocks for the Jane Austen quilt just as Becky Brown is making them with those fabrics. Love the color combinations. My question is this: will a fat quarter pack of the collection make the quilt? Is the yardage requirements for the WHOLE quilt posted somewhere on the blog and I've missed it? I

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