Playing with colors: Blue

For a while now, one of thing things I've wanted to do is work on a series of monochromatic quilts to kind of play with color and value, and basically as an excuse to buy lots and lots and lots of batik fabrics.

In between work and class and homework and occasionally cleaning house I've managed to put together three lap-sized quilts, each taking a slightly different approach towards color values.  All of them using stripes as the primary motif.  I'd already made my niece's quilt, and my big green quilt using this general technique... but I wanted to see what else I could do with it.

First up (or second if you count my green quilt) is blue.  I just used various length strips and alternated between dark and light blues.  The black lines were meant to give the quilt some visual structure and to bring down the overall color of the quilt into something a bit deeper.

I used straight-line quilting for the black strips, but wavy lines for the blue.  The intention was to evoke ocean waves.

Part of me thinks that this quilt was not especially successful.  It doesn't really evoke the ocean, and the variation between the colors is much too intense in places.

But on the other hand, the whole point of this series was to just kinda see what happened if I put the colors together this way or that way, and well, now I know.