Playing with colors: Yellow

Here is the final quilt in my playing with colors series.  I liked the structure I used in the red quilt, but I wanted to try something a little different.  I also wanted to do a better job of blending the colors, unlike the total randomness of the blue quilt.

I divided out the colors into dark, medium, and light groups.  Then sewed together strips that blended from dark to light, and alternated which direction each strip went as I sewed it up.  I was thinking 'rays of sunshine' although generally those rays only go in one direction. 

The blending on this quilt is much better than on the blue quilt, and I like the way the difference in the level of contrast is  intentional rather than accidental. 


I went with minimal straight-line quilting on this one.  Yeah, that was partly laziness, but also because sometimes less is more.

I learned something really really significant on this quilt - the joys of a walking foot!  I was getting really frustrated by how even my straight lines were causing a lot of bunching and texture on the previous quilts.  In the past I've either tried to counter it by altering the direction I was sewing in every other row, or by just embracing the bunching with wavy lines.  But after my first line down the center of this quilt, I'd had it.  I really wanted it to just quilt flat!!!

So I went down to the fabric store and I picked up a $60 walking foot  (my whole machine cost less than $200 btw).   I set it up and sewed a bit on a practice scrap.  OMG!  Within about 10 stitches I was impressed.  I could not believe how much of a difference it made! The fabric wasn't bunching up - it was being fed evenly through the foot, and the stitches were so neat and even!  Everyone always talks about this gadget or that, and I'm always skeptical.  I simply had no idea that it would be so much easier, and look so much nicer to quilt with a walking foot!

In the end, I'm very happy with my walking foot, and I'm beyond thrilled with this quilt.  Who knew I'd be such a fan of yellow, but it is just so bright and so cheery and so yummy, it put such a huge smile on my face when it was all done.  There will definitely need to be more yellow in future quilts!

So that's what I've been working on this spring, playing with colors and trying to learn something about contrast.  I've got a few more WIPs but probably not much to post for a while. 

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.

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.