Winter Grove Pillow, and Re-sizing Applique Patterns

Good morning everyone! If you are visiting for the first time from Sew Mama Sew, welcome! I hope you take a few minutes to look around!

It’s my absolute pleasure to have a tutorial up at Sew Mama Sew today, for an original project inspired by one of the projects in Modern Appliqué Illusions–my Winter Grove Pillow.

Those of you who already have the book or who followed along with the blog tour will recognize this pillow as similar to the Grove quilt in the book. The original Grove quilt was inspired by late summer afternoons, but for this project I decided to try and reinterpret Grove for a different season.

I reduced the size of the appliques and rearranged the trees and shadows for this take on Grove, and I substituted colors that reminded me of dusk when I was growing up in Northern Minnesota. The sun was usually setting by the time I got off the school bus at 3:00 p.m., and I was always fascinated by the cool colors that were created by the slanting light and the bluish shadows upon the snow. You can get the full-sized templates and directions over at Sew Mama Sew! They’ll also be giving away a copy of the book, so make sure to hop over there and leave a comment!

I also wanted to add a couple notes about reducing (or enlarging) PDF applique patterns. One of my favorite things about appliqué is how adaptable it is–once you have a pattern, you can apply it to any type of object, at any scale. I love this aspect so much that I even asked participants in my blog tour to make scaled-down versions of the projects in the book. Here, I’d like to give you an easy way to do this yourself.

With a printed pattern, re-sizing can be accomplished by reducing (or enlarging) the patterns on a photocopier. However, the patterns for Modern Appliqué Illusions are delivered as printable PDF files, which makes this process even easier, in my opinion.

The first thing you’ll want to do is download a free copy of Adobe’s PDF Reader, as it gives you a lot of options when it comes to printing your PDFs. Once you’ve opened your PDF in Adobe’s Reader, you can choose to Print your file, which is where the options come into play.

Choosing to Print the file will open up the Print Dialog Box. Once you see this, select the Poster option.

Choosing this will bring up the Tile Scale box. This box gives you the ability to input whatever percentage you’d like to reduce or enlarge the printed file. For this example, I chose 25%.

If you are enlarging your image so much that it needs to be split between pages, the Overlap box will be handy–this is where you choose how much you would like each page to overlap with the adjacent page. If you are reducing your patterns, though, this won’t be necessary, and if you are using patterns from Modern Appliqué Illusions, the overlaps have already been built in.

When you finally get to printing, you will still probably need to tape multiple sheets together to get the full pattern pieces, but all of your pieces will be reduced to the same scale, ready for you to use on whatever type of project you want!

Finally, I’m so excited about this new project that I’d also like to giveaway a copy of Modern Appliqué Illusions here on my blog! To enter, just leave a comment about which pattern from the book you’d like to make, either in reduced-size or full-size! (To see all of the project, just have a look at the last several posts, as I’ve been talking about each book project during the recent blog tour!) I’ll draw a random winner at midnight one week from today!

Best of luck, and many thanks for visiting and reading! Have a great day!

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