fifties fabric fun

a couple of days ago, i saw this and fell in love.

so clever and sweet! and very grace kelly as well.

a quick search later, and somehow i find myself ordering a yard of this from spoonflower! can't wait till it gets here.

but looking at all the spoonflower stuff reminded me of an idea for a project i had last year: to make a quilt for the cottage. out of fabric reproduced from the orginal cottage curtains. but as yet i'd done nothing! so, inspiration.

i dug up some photos of the curtains, brought them into an illustrator program, and began turning them into crisp vectors. this is almost like knitting - sort of mindless yet engaging. tweaking images can be done while sorta watching a movie or listening to the news, but it's relaxing, it gives my brain a little rest. and i can somehow focus on this sort of task for ages.



i'd say i'm about half done - there are three squares that make up the pattern repeat, the deer square, and two thistle squares. but the thistle squares are actually the same, only mirrored. i've done the deer square, and just started the thistles, so i'd call that halfway there. here's a deer:



here's the original, for comparison. i think i need to tweak that red a bit:



and, just to say i actually got something done, here's another fabric pattern, based on a different arrangement of some of the original elements. i think this might make a nice backing, or pillowslips or something: