Watercolor fabric selection

October 27th, 2008

Saturday I taught the Holiday Tree class in Salado, Texas at A Sewing Basket.  It is a wonderful shop with lots of different fabrics and friendly staff.  Anyway, we reviewed do’s and don’ts on buying watercolor fabrics.

Some of the do’s:

Size: Medium to large scale

Shapes: Curvy designs like flowers, fruit, paisleys

Color: Fabrics with 3 or more  colors

Some of the don’ts:

Size: avoid prints that are too small, calicos

Shape: avoid straight lines, geometric lines, strips, plaids, dots

Color: avoid tone-on-tone

The reasoning is that the eye needs to move from one 2″ square to the next.  Your 2″ square should never be small enough to show the entire design because that will stop the eye.  The goal is to have an image that looks like a painting.

One Response to “Watercolor fabric selection”

  1. gayle ledyardon 02 Nov 2008 at 5:53 pm

    Thanks Barbara for coming and teaching the watercolor class last weekend. Enjoyed it – am almost done with frabric placement for my Christmas Tree – I was able to get some add’l material along with some white poinsetta material and I think its going to look great. Enjoyed your class and hope to stay in touch. Thanks again.
    Gayle Ledyard

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