Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Color and the Shop Hop Blocks

I have a confession to make.  I have issues with color.

I don't know if there's a term for the color equivalent to "perfect pitch"...maybe "color memory".  Whatever it's called, I have it and it drives me absolutely batty to see colors that don't go together, put together.

Silly me... I thought it would be "fun" to buy the block kits at each of the shops since I intended to visit all of them this shop hop.  I was about 4 shops into the process before the coffee kicked in and I realized that I didn't really like the quilts being made with the blocks.  This is the way one shop put them together. (sorry about the glare from the pattern photo)

After a couple days worth of contemplation, I decided to see if I would like it if I used black for the background color of every block, and swapped out any light or pastel with dark lime, blue, fuchsia or purple.

This block is the Bluebird Quilt Studio (Caldwell) block called "Cat and Mouse".  The only substitution I made was fuchsia in place of the white-on-white that was included with the kit.

Although I like all the fabrics that were included in the Quilt Expressions (Boise) block, I opted to stick with the black background idea, and picked a stronger blue to balance out the purple that was included.  Since I want all the colors to have a blue undertone, I swapped the strongly orange-print fuchsia for one with blue and green.

My current plan is to make 9 blocks using my new substitution rules.  If I don't hate it at that point, I'm considering adding an outside border of Gerbera Daisies to include some of the omitted fabrics.

2 comments:

Bailey said...

I'm really looking forward to seeing your coordinating blocks! I hope they get a lot of feedback about the blocks this year and make some improvements for next year so they all coordinate better.

Unknown said...

Looks like you have a stunning jewel tone quilt and you are 100% right in the swaps you've made and the black background - there is the potential here for something really stunning
I'd even suggest moving away from a standard sampler quilt set up for the blocks and put them on point with a complimenting border