When I held the latest issue of the French magazine 'Marie-Claire Idées' in my hand and saw this beautiful work, it seemed to me like a rather new and exciting approach on patchwork:
Still, this would mean a lot of time and fuzzy, tiny patchwork pieces, each to be sewn down with a 5 mm seam - real miniature work - which I'm not up to at the moment.
So I decided to simplify both the pattern and the technique - aiming at that fabric pixel effect, but in a more 'malfatto' way ... faster, easier - and not too exact. :-)
In one of my cross-stitch books, I found this somewhat smaller rose pattern - with not too many colours.
As there are three different reds (and one pink) in this pattern, and I wanted to use the scraps available, I sorted the red ones in three colour 'families', instead of using the same fabric allover for one specific shade of colour. - This is an experiment on the go, so we will see how it turns out in the end!
Then I started cutting up suitable fabric scraps into 3 x 3 cm pieces - using a roller cutter and a cutting mat. Some of the thin or fraying fabrics needed to be doubled with a thin iron-on-vylene.
For guidance, I drew up a 3 x 3 cm grid with a pencil directly on the background fabric and sprayed it lightly with a temporary positioning glue.
I worked the pattern in smaller segments, bonding the squares with a zig-zag seam and then attaching a new piece of background fabric, when the first had been completed.
It's almost like laying a jigsaw puzzle!
(German summary: Pixel patchwork - die Idee an sich aus einer Zeitschrift, allerdings habe ich sie etwas abgewandelt, um ein schnelleres und nicht ganz so aufwendiges Ergebnis zu erreichen. Ich verwende einen Haftspray und nähe anschließend die 'rohen' Quadrate mit Zick-zack direkt auf den Untergrund fest.)