Mama By Design

When people choose fabrics to send in for custom carriers, of course they want to know how much fabric they need to buy. What I tell them might be kind of confusing. I say:

“Send 3/4 yard for your lining. If you would like your panel to be the same fabric as your lining, that amount will suffice. For the border, you may send a fat quarter, a quarter yard (if you are shopping online, or your independent quilt store won’t cut fat quarters for you), or I will choose from my ginormous Hoffman 1895 fat quarter stash.”

That’s pretty simple, easy to follow, BUT what if somebody wants a panel that is different than the lining? That’s where it gets confusing.

“Well,” sez me. “If your fabric has a small print, send 1/2 yard or a fat quarter. If your fabric has a large print, send 3/4 yard. I need to cut a 9X9 piece, or an 11×11 piece if you don’t want a border. If you go to a quilt store, you might be able to get away with a smaller piece even if your fabric has a large print, because you’ll be able to see whether the part of the image that you want for your panel can be cut properly.”

Huh? Finally, the perfect fabric came in. This is what it looked like on the website. The mama who ordered this carrier was particularly enamored of the red fish.

Here is a 3/4 yard cut of this very large scale print.

See how the only complete red fish is smack in the center of the cut? We were using this fabric for both panel and lining, the print was large enough that we didn’t use a border. For a smaller print, we could have probably gotten two carriers out of the 3/4 yards, but in this case I barely had enough space to squeeze the lining template into the upper left-hand corner. It wouldn’t fit anywhere else without being sideways. Imagine what it would have looked like as a 1/2 yard cut, the tail would have been cut off!

So, if your fabric has a great big print like this, and especially if you are ordering online where you can’t see the cut, you’ll need to send lots of it. For a panel to come out the way you want, 3/4 yard is the minimum, even if you are also sending a different 3/4 yard piece for the lining. I will send the extra fabric back to you.