Moroccan colours & printing PDFs at an increased percentage...

I'm piecing together a quilt for someone special at the moment, hence the most un-Florence hues colouring the scraps that gathered over my floor as I worked. They looked so vibrant and appealing that I felt compelled to photograph them in an attempt to quell my desire to turn the scraps into a permanent modern art installation that would celebrate my brief dalliance with more rich, saturated colours. When I make quilts for my own home I'm hampered by how much I wish to be surrounded by calm, neutral colours and so miss out on the fun of working with such intense colour palettes. However, in this case, the aim was to put together some fabrics that had a distinctly Moroccan feel to them: warm, sunshiny, intense.

Above are the fabrics that were eventually settled on for the quilt - they are all prints designed by Anna Maria Horner and they span the Good Folks and Innocent Crush collections. I spent several evenings pouring over my quilt books for a suitable pattern, but nothing seemed quite right, until I returned to Anna Maria Horner's blog and spotted the Love Emblem quilt which she has very kindly made available as a free download. Before ordering my fabrics I spent some time on the computer playing with which fabrics should go where and the screenshot below shows the original Love Emblem quilt from the pattern and next to and below it I've indicated the placement of my chosen fabrics and what quantity of each I will need...this method seems to be the only way for my brain to make sense of things.

Fabrics ordered, it was only then that I approached my local copy shop and found that to increase the pattern pieces to 165% an A2 printer was required to print the pattern out, which would amount to £30 (which would have made this the most expensive pattern I'd ever bought)! Gulp. However, a quick tweet on Twitter about my conundrum and within half an hour, and with plenty of other helpful suggestions, Roberta (follow @SewBertie to get to know this lovely genius) had suggested a way to print it out on my A4 printer at home. Bertie's suggestion allowed me to input what percentage I wanted the PDF pattern increased by and then print it out on A4 pages that could be stuck together to make the full-size pattern pieces. Because I had such difficulty working out how to do this, I thought it might be helpful to copy and paste Adobe's own instructions at the end of this post (unfortunately they're in the middle of a very long page, so I can't link to just the right section on their own site for you). It was necessary for me to download the free version of Adobe Reader 10 to be able to use this scaling function...but it's free and easy to do! 

Pattern printing problems aside, I've now finished piecing the quilt top and I'm delighted with it - the pattern is not the easiest to put together (not because the instructions aren't clear, just because there are so many pieces intersecting one another), but the finished quilt top is really lovely and I'm in awe of how anyone goes about designing a pattern like this. Today I'm going to quilt it and perhaps bind it too.

And finally, I thought you might be as delighted by this as I was - when my fat quarters arrived from Gone to Earth they had been folded in an origami style! Utterly delightful to unwrap.

Prints from the Good Folks range all came from Gone to Earth, while those from the Innocent Crush line were ordered from M is for Make...

Wishing you a lovely week,
Florence x

As promised here are the Adobe instructions below:

Printing PDFs out at an increased percentage:
Important: Adobe Reader 9 or earlier do not support printing across multiple pages (tiling).

You can magnify or reduce a PDF by an exact percentage.

1.Choose File and Print.
2.From the Page Scaling pop-up menu, select Tile All Pages to expose the Tile Scale % option.
Note: If the tile options are not in the menu, make sure that the following options are not selected in the Advanced Print dialog box: Print as Image or, for Acrobat only, Separations or In-RIP Separations.
3.For Tile Scale, type the percentage you want to magnify or reduce the PDF. Click any other option to refresh the preview on the right.
You can then specify what you want the overlap of the pages to be (I chose 1/2") so that you can fold the edges over to tape the pieces together, as well as requesting that it's printed with 'cut marks' to assist you in finding the correct overlap amount (this seems fairly essential to me, as it really helps you to stick the pattern pieces together accurately).
4.Click OK or Print.

(These instructions were taken from here - the page might help you solve other PDF printing dilemmas).