Thursday, June 14, 2012

Playing with colors: Red

Here is the next quilt in my series playing with color and value. For this one I divided my fabrics into lights and darks, and further divided them into light lights & medium lights, and dark darks & medium darks. One stripe is alternating light light/medium light fabrics, and the next stripe alternates between dark dark and medium dark.





I used straight line quilting in the dark rows, and wavy lines in the lighter rows.  Kind of a darker reds = serious & steady,  lighter pinks = playful kind of thing.




I think this was a much more successful project than the blue quilt.  I do like the way I've given some organization to the colors, but still kept the individual strips somewhat random in size and distribution. 

So far, the lesson learned with these first two quilts is what happens when you randomly distribute high and low value colors (your eyes kind of bounce around the entire quilt), and what happens when you organize them (eye movement is more focused).  In these two examples, I definitely prefer the more organized approach.  But I do think this is something I want to keep playing with.

7 comments:

Kaye said...

And it's bleed free? (Do you prewash your fabric? I read that some people do, some people don't...)

Rebel said...

I don't pre-wash my fabrics. I like the whole quilt to shrink a bit in the wash to get crinkly. I washed it in cold water, and it didn't bleed, or not significantly. One of benefits of a mono-chromatic quilt is that if it bleeds - so what?

Exuberantcolor/Wanda S Hanson said...

I like both the red and the blue one. Keep playing and in the end you will love them all for their differences.

Michael5000 said...

That's some pretty yummy machine quilting my friend. Furrowlicious.

Rebel said...

Thanks Wanda - your projects really do inspire me.

M5K - Thanks. Furrowlicious indeed.

florapie said...

OK, I liked the blue one, but I love the red one! You make me wish I could sew!

Rebel said...

florapie - Thanks! Sewing is like anything else, check out some 'how to' resources, give it a try, make a ton of mistakes, try again, make lots of different mistakes and keep going. Eventually you get something you like =)