Old and New: Reproduction Versus Modern?

One of my big interests in quilting is reproduction fabrics. Reproduction fabrics are fabrics that have patterns from a long time ago. They can either be exact replicas based on fabrics in museum collections (such as the Sturbridge Village collections) or fabrics inspired by them that have the right "look," but aren't exact replicas. The most popular time periods for reproduction fabrics are the Depression-era fabrics from the 1930s and fabrics from the time of the American Civil War.

I really like fabrics from the first half of the 1800s, and I collect a lot of them. They make up about half of my fabric collection, which currently fills 19 boxes, or about 145 gallons of fabric. Of my reproduction fabric collection, many of them are Dargate fabrics. I briefly mentioned these in my previous post. These are reproduction fabrics that are exact replicas and inspirations based on a sample book of French fabrics from the 1840s.

The premise of my block of the month club was to make a 15.5 inch-square block out of fabrics from the Dargate collection. Because the patterns can be tricky, and because the kit for each month only has "fat eighths," there is no extra fabric in case you make a mistake. (A fat eighth is a piece of fabric 9 inches wide by 22 inches long.) So, I started out by making a practice block out of scrap fabrics that I had on hand before I cut out the "official" Dargate fabric. I picked the theme blue and yellow and white because I had lots of blue scraps on hand.

I quickly came to realize that I liked my "practice" quilt better than my official Dargate collection quilt. I think that part of the problem is in the fabrics. Sometimes I didn't always like the fabrics that the store owner selected to order from the larger Dargate collection. I ended up ordering a lot of supplemental fabrics from Reproduction Fabrics and Z & S Fabrics to round out the collection. Although some of the fabric designs are strikingly modern, a lot of the blocks come out looking like they were made by somebody's Great Aunt sitting in a dimly lit Victorian parlor with long tablecloths and doilies and knickknacks everywhere. I think that I can make the official quilt a little better with the fabrics that I ordered from the other fabrics stores, though.

Here is the block that I made out of scrap fabrics that I talked about in my previous post:














This is the same quilt block pattern, but made in the Dargate fabrics: