So after I organized my fabrics, which I talked about in Part 1, I thought about what color I wanted to use in my first quilt. I don't use red and pink very often so I had A LOT of those colors. I decided to jump into very uncomfortable waters with this quilt. I read in the book "Oh, Scrap!" that it is okay to throw in a bunch of variations of the same color and neighboring colors on the color wheel. So here is my quilt:
Here is my color wheel and how I used it: I stuck to the colors on the theses "pages", which are red, red-blue, Magenta, blue and chartreuse. You need to use a variety of shades, meaning lots of lights, mediums and darks. You can't mix together colors that have grey and no grey!! That is one of the main keys to success. None of my colors have grey in them. Once I took out any grey toned colors, all of a sudden my stash looked like it matched. The "Ultimate 3 in 1 Color Tool" makes it easy to sort your fabrics into "grey toned" and "no grey".
So let's look at the next quilt I made. I decided I wanted to make a quilt with just blues. Well, blues and lots of low volume background fabric. I stuck with "true" blues, not ones tinted with red or green. I matched up each of my fabric choices to the card to make sure I was picking a cohesive group of blues. The blues I picked were on the "blue" and "cerulean blue" cards. The lighter blues I picked were on the turquoise blue card. I didn't really have lights on the other cards, and it looks fine.
I was able to include all sorts of low volume fabrics in this quilt. My favorites were ones with bits of blue and green in them, but I included most colors. It worked out well because the blues were strong enough to share the quilt with other smaller bits of color, meaning they were never over powered by the other colors. Blue is overwhelmingly the main focus of the quilt, which is what I wanted. You can purchase the pattern to this quilt here, in my Etsy Shop. It comes with directions for five sizes, so hopefully you can make several over the years!
Here is the last quilt I made. I love purples, so I wanted that to be the focus of this quilt. I didn't have a bunch of purples on hand, so I bought about eight fat quarters on the internet to make sure I had a good selection. In this quilt I used magenta, fuchsia, purple and red-violet. On the back of the color card it shows colors that play nice with the focus color. One of those colors is green, so I chose a few greens from the chartreuse card to complement the purples.
The pattern for this quilt is in my Etsy Shop. I wrote this one in five sizes as well. I always like to try to write the pattern for multiple sizes to make it more useful! The blocks are fairly small. They finish at 7 1/2". I have made several Churn Dash quilt patterns but this one sets itself apart because the actual churn dash is quite small. You can use 2 1/2" strips to make them! They can also be made with layer cake squares if you want. This is a forgiving pattern because none of the seams have to matchi up, it makes things easier!
