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:

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2012/04/austen-quilt.html

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 a 

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

http://www.unitednotions.com/fcc_collections_warmth.pdf

And the Mill Book Series. The new line is Collection: Mill Book Circa 1852

http://storefront.unitednotions.com/storefrontCommerce/itemDetail.do?item-id=220046&order-quantity=1&customer-item=1864.16094&order-uom=&warehouse-id=8&item-number=1864.16094