And the quilting habit takes off!

After finishing the quilt from the first quilting class that I had taken, my interest in making quilts increased. I went to Quilt in a Day and found a pattern that I liked. Well, what I *really* liked was the quilt on the cover of the book. And *that* was the quilt I wanted to make - white with red floral and blue floral fabrics. I really tried to duplicate that quilt. I'm sure I spent more than an hour looking for fabric that would result in a quilt that looked similar to the quilt on the cover. I finally realized it wasn't going to happen. So I spent nearly as much time trying to find 5 other fabrics to use in that pattern. I think this is the quilt that gave me the most problems in finding fabrics. Maybe it was because I was still a beginner. Maybe it was that the shop did not have the fabric selections that *I* needed (and still need - the more fabric in the shop, the happier I am). Eventually, I went with "close enough". Here's the quilt:



And here's what you cannot see from the photo: The lightest peach/coral fabric is a multi-color print that contains green. But it is an olive-y green. And the other "green" fabrics are really blue-ish green. If you put the multi-color light peach next to either of the greens, they just do NOT play well together - at least if you look at them closely. However, when I look at the entire quilt (not the individual parts), my eye doesn't see those clashing greens. It sees the peachy color. And the darker coral color plays up the blending colors from the lighter fabric. So the end result is still pleasing.

So the lesson from this quilt is that colors don't need to match perfectly. It's the totality of the effect, how the major colors play with each other, and the light/medium/dark contrasts that are important.

Oh, I still sometimes try to get too matchy-matchy with my fabrics. One of my more recent quilts (one of my favorites and I do love it) was made from at least 25-30 different print fabrics, yet somehow the quilt kinda looks like it was made from only 2 fabrics, a light and a dark. I'll get to that one later in my quilting chronicles.

But, before I end this post, I'm going to show you another quilt made from the same pattern...



My niece wanted a pink and purple quilt (she was about 8 or 9 at the time). I had lots of pink, but I didn't have purple. (Or it was more that I wasn't sure I could work on pink & purple in the same quilt.) As I had lots of blue, I substituted. Some years later, I kind of regretted not using pink/purple since that was what she asked for, but by then it was too late. Anyway, I really liked how her quilt was turning out and decided I wanted one like it. But as I measured how much fabric I had left, I didn't have quite enough to make an identical quilt. But, as it turned out, by changing color placement I could still make a similar quilt. The one you see in the photo above is mine. My niece's quilt has the exact same fabrics used in the same way, but where mine is blue hers is pink and where mine is pink hers is blue.

I mentioned that this was the same pattern as the earlier photo. It is. It's just that pieces of the block are colored differently from the earlier quilt (and not just the change from green/coral to pink/blue). In the coral/green quilt, there are roundish areas of white. These are really white squares with 2 coral corners and 2 green corners. But in the pink/blue quilt, the white squares have 4 light blue corners. The 9-patches in the pink/blue quilt have white centers, while the 9-patches in the coral/green quilt have 9 colored squares. What an amazing difference color placement can make.

Kathy