Alabama Chanin · Inklingo · Sewing

The importance of scale

I decided to make this cute little bunny toy as a quick baby present for my friend because it’s looking likely that the baby quilt I’m planning won’t be finished before she is born. So I downloaded the pattern from the Alabama Chanin site and printed it up, cut out the pieces. But they didn’t make sense when you put them together. The pocket is massively huge, the apron doesn’t reach the sides of the body piece and the ear insides are bigger than the actual ears. To illustrate, I overlapped the pieces.

Bunny-Rabbit-Pattern-badscale

I checked the book that the pattern is originally published in and the scale is the same as the scale in the downloadable file. I found this completely aggravating as I had to recut three of the patterns (keeping the original body size) before it would look remotely like the photo they provided.

After rescaling, you can see the difference is significant.

Bunny-Rabbit-Pattern-comparescale

This isn’t the first time I’ve bumped into difficulties with Alabama Chanin patterns. The other pattern was the Indigo Star Throw (which I still haven’t finished!) where the supplied “templates” refused to match up to a logical size. I ended up buying the Inkling0 6″ Le Moyne Star collection as a compromise.

Here is the Bunny Rabbit pattern with the pieces in correct scale with each other.

Bunny-Rabbit-Pattern-fixed

It’s more than a little disappointing that I have to do this.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.