Color Inspiration--Part 2

So what do I do when I want to make something but have 0% inspiration on where to start color wise?  I turn to nature.  Mother Nature has provided us with so many beautiful things to see, how could you not be inspired?  However, this does not mean I pack up and go outside...all though that's not a bad idea either.  I take the modern lazy approach and set on the couch and surf Pinterest.  I do not have a great camera, but it allows me to take advantage of the fact other people do and like to share their work.

I have found two great programs from Sherwin-Williams that help me in deciding which colors to pull from photographs.  The first is Chip-It which is a free program on their webpage.  It's very easy to use, you just upload the picture from your computer and it will give you color "chips." matched to the picture.  

I found this butterfly picture on Pinterest and LOVE the pop of orange with the soft purples.  When I upload it to Chip-It this is what it gave me.

I do love the colors it produced but was disappointed to see that the orange did not come through.  Unfortunately with Chip-It you do not have an option to try to grab other colors from the picture.  However, they have a phone app for iPhone and Android called ColorSnap and it will let you pick and choose.  This is what it came up with on the first try.

This time it did pick up orange but not the vibrant one.  No problem.  You can use your finger to move the bubbles to the colors that you like.  When you move one of the bubbles a little window with a white cross hair appears so that you can see exactly where you are placing it and the circle will change to the color of what the cross hairs are touching.

With the original color sample I decided to trade out the taupe and the orange and this is what it would look like

Another nice thing about the phone app is if you find a crazy fabric at the store, you could snap a picture of it, upload it and boom you have help picking out your colors.  It's also fun to print pictures and match things up yourself.  I've kind of found there is a trial and error in picking fabrics and like anything the more you do it the better you will get.  

And when all else fails be a rebel, throw out all color rules and make a scrappy quilt.

Sometimes breaking all the rules can be even prettier!

Color Inspiration--Part 1

I think one reason I love quilting so much is that it allows us to challenge ourselves on different levels.  You can be as complex or as simple in the thought process as you like.  You can take the time to design a pattern, figure out all the math behind it, choose your fabric and colors, cut it and piece it and then quilt your own unique creation.  Or you might find yourself walking around your local quilt shop and spy the most amazing quilt kit (maybe even with pre-cut pieces), piece it together and then send it off to be quilted.  From a California King all the way down to itty bitty, I love it all.

When I first started out one of the things that I found most difficult was to pick out fabric for my projects.  Similar to painting and drawing (disclaimer: I'm not claiming to be an expert on this) you must consider color and value but with quilting print and scale are thrown in.  Even just saying, "Oh, what colors shall I use?" makes things sound much more simpler than they are.  Things to consider with color is shade, saturation of the color throughout the fabric, and temperature (hot/cold) of the color.  We can use a monochromatic (based on one color), analogous (blue/green/yellow or red/purple/blue), or complementary color scheme for our quilts.  You can add interest to your quilt by adding different values (light, medium, dark) of fabric.  Then toss in fabric pattern or lack there of and scale of the pattern and things get crazy and your head really starts to hurt!  

Leni Levenson Wiener has a great book called 3-Fabric Quilts that covers the topics of color, value and print scale.

 The book has several patterns that will allow you to play with these topics using only three fabrics...testing the waters without going too crazy.  Sometimes we must learn to craw before we run.

Thankfully the fabric Gods love us and gave us tools that make things much easier, like pre-cuts.  I cannot say how much I love my fat quarter bundles, jellyrolls, charm packs and layer cakes.  These beauties allow me to create using fabrics that are proven to go together or are from a fabric line.  With the addition of white fabric, part of this fat quarter bundle

became this

I just had to figure out how to fit the pieces together to get the look I wanted.  I didn't have to spend hours in the store pulling bolts off the shelf, looking for the correct lighting and scratching my head.

Fat quarter bundles can also just be a great place to start.  Some stores will put coordinating fabrics together that may not be from the same fabric line, but are from bolts of fabric within the store.  If your quilt requires more yardage, find a bundle that speaks to you and ask for help locating the bolts.  I'm not aware of any fabric stores that would not love to sell you lots and lots of yardage for your stash...I mean project.

Three Little Miniatures Setting In A Row

I'm pretty excited that I've been able to keep up with Pat Sloan's Aurifil Designer Mystery BOM challenge for the year.  And so far I LOVE each one of them.  The picture above shows my finished Flurry mini, Chubby Churn Dash mini, and this month's mini designed by Kimberly Jolly from Fat Quarter Shop.

I dug deep into my fabric stash to come up with two coordinating fat quarter bundles that I purchased someplace locally last summer.

I decided to add an additional boarder of the darker maroon fabric to practice doing feather boarders.

Usually I try to draw up a quilting design before I actually dig in and for some reason I could not completely commit to what I originally designed.

Instead of doing the different quilting designs in each of the color bans, I kept things simpler with my favorite dot-to-dot design.  I loved the idea of the feathers with scribbling as the filler to make them pop a bit.

Because it can be a bit tricky seeing where you are going when working white on white, I used my blue water soluble pen to mark my echo lines so that I didn't get carried away and quilt over them...although it probably happened several times anyway, it is called scribbling.

 This is the first quilting project that I have been brave enough to attempt feathers.  I marked my spines with a porcelain quilting pencil and free formed the plumes as I went.  Overall I was very pleased for my first try on an actual pieced project.  

I'll even be brave and show a peek of the back...

I cannot thank Pat enough for the idea of mini quilts each month.  It helps to have a small sense of accomplishment each month.  Thanks Pat!

Scribbling like a kid again

I think I fell in love this weekend...with a quilting filler.  I love taking classes on Craftsy.  It is a site where you can purchase all kinds of online classes...not just quilting...drawing, knitting, cooking, cake decorating, woodworking, gardening and so much more.  It's crazy!  You can access them 24/7 and post your questions and read others questions as you watch the videos.  I posted a question for the first time this weekend and was quite impressed that the instructor responded within 12 hours.

My love affair was sparked when I watched Cindy Needham's class called Design it, Quilt it: Free Form Techniques.  I'm not sure why I waited so long to take this class.  I knew she would be talking about stencils and I have never used them, so I was not sure how relevant the class would be for me.  All I can say is I wish I had downloaded it before now.  One of the topics she covered was shadow and sunshine with in the quilting.  This was something I had never considered before...creating shadowing.  It's easy to look at a painting or drawing and see these techniques, but I had never really thought about it in quilting.

In the beginning, if I needed a background filler I would have just tried stippling, because it was what I knew how to do.  As I felt more comfortable moving the fabric under the needle I added other fillers to my list and learned that some fillers would make things stand out better.

I used loops as a filler in this boarder to create diamond shapes, though I would not say that it creates much shadow.

I used back and forth lines in the in the white blocks of the 16 patches to make the unquilted pink squares stand out more, getting slightly more dense and more shadow.

I used Kathleen from Kathleen Quilts tutorial on doing these flying geese to create quilted blocks in the sashing of this quilt.  My lines are closer together and creates even more shadow, making my little birds stand out as they fly.

Now to meet my new best friend...scribbling.  

Honestly, it's not that pretty to look at on paper and it breaks all the rules, which makes it pretty easy to do.  WARNING: YOUR LINES WILL CROSS.   I played around on some scrap sandwiches before I actually tried it on something I was working on.  

 I note of advice if you are using a thread color matching the fabric...

 I marked around my line of echo stitching with blue water soluble pen so that I didn't go crazy and quilt over it.  Sometimes when you are zooming around, it's easy to get carried away.

 This is the center of the mini quilt I'm working on and I still  have quite a bit more to do, but I love the effect of all the dense quilting.  I'm not sure if the pictures do it justice, but it almost looks like a delicate lace in between the feather plums.

Accountability of the Accountant

Slow down 2015!  Time is passing to quickly and there is not enough hours in one day to complete everything that I need and want to do, and there seems to be big differences in the things I need to do and want to do.  I need to work, those stinking adult responsibilities just won't seem to go away.  I want to quilt 24/7 and somehow those two things are getting in the way of each other.  My long term goal is to find a way to bring them into balance...oh, crystal ball where are you??

The other fail on my part is to embrace healthy living.  I love my family very much and I want to be around a long time to make them miserable and drive them crazy.  It's a free service I provide to those that love me.  I realize with 40 sneaking up on me that maybe I'm not 20 anymore.  Things effect you differently, though I do not want to easily admit that.  Things like blood pressure and cholesterol must be taken into consideration because they do exist.  I need to take them even more seriously because heart disease runs wild within my family and I'm hoping my choices have not lead it to my door already.  I lost my father in 2011 to a massive heart attack and miss him everyday.  I do not want this for my daughter.  

So after a doctor's appointment on Monday I find myself looking forward to finding out my cholesterol levels...oh goody...and needing to lose at least 10lbs by May.  BLAH.  I can do this, I know I can but I must find a way to balance my life.  I thought by making an announcement of this information maybe the fear of public shaming will scare me into the changes.  No one wants to admit failure.  So check back in with me in a month and see if I've succeeded.  

I have be wanting to try my hand at quilting feathers ever since I started free motion quilting.  I try to draw them everywhere to get the muscle memory down.  I've watch videos, read books, and searched on Pinterest (or the black hole of time as I like to call it) about drawing feathers.  Finally, I think I have it down!

I also spent a little time playing around and ended up with this.

I have not been brave enough to try combining fillers yet but I think I'm ready to give it a try.

I needed a break from a bigger quilt I have been working on and Pat Sloan revealed the next Aurifil Designer Mystery Mini quilt this week, so I decided to piece it last night.  I love it!  It may be my favorite so far.

 I just finished watching Cindy Needham's class called Design it, Quilt it: Free Form Techniques on Craftsy and hope to incorporate some of the things I learned in this class.  Will feathers finally make an appearance on this little top?  Stay tuned.

So I will close with this (and it's more for me than anyone reading this);  if you can free motion a feather after all the hard work, you can lose 10lbs, so please shut up and just do it :)

Is It Cheating/Why Do I Feel Guilty?

Four days into March and I am completely caught up on my BOM that I'm working on.  I'm absolutely in love with my bitty blocks for the Quilty Pleasures Bitty Blocks BOM .

The block sizes are either 3" or 4" and it will be a row quilt.  Sometimes its the small things that make us happy.

So why do I have a guilty conscience? 

The answer is this note.  I wrote the names of all the quilt tops I have that need quilted and taped it to my desk at work.  It's my daily reminder to get on the ball, my motivation to make the list go away.  So last month I pulled out the Jelly Roll Race Quilt, its backing fabric, batting, an issue of Quilty Magazine, went to the fabric store...and promptly pieced thirteen of these blocks...

Wait!  That is not how that was suppose to go.  Too many distractions!  Now my pretty little strawberry blocks are just waiting to be joined together with sashing and setting triangles to become a finished quilt top.  What's the problem?  It then becomes another name on my list.  By opening that magazine I allowed myself to cheat on my list of UFO's.  So will I finish piecing together the strawberries or pull out the brand new spool of thread and quilt a quilt top?  I'm thinking the best thing to do is take a deep breath, go home, open a new bottle of wine and figure it out then :) 

Chubby Churn Dash

I'm not sure where the rest of February went but it seems like I blinked and the entire month was gone.  However, I didn't let it sneak past me without finishing Pat Sloan's Aurifil Designer of the month challenge.  February's mini quilt was designed by Jonanna Figueroa at Fig Tree & Co. and is called Chubby Churn Dash.  With a name like that how could you not love it??  With Valentines Day in the air and that word "chubby" in the title I couldn't help but think of cute little cherubs and soft pinks and blues. With my goal being to whittle down my stash of fabrics my mind instantly went to some charm packs of Papillon by 3 Sisters that I have been saving FOREVER.  But of course as soon as I pulled out my totes of charm packs other fabrics caught my eye.

I almost changed my mind and grabbed the bright batiks in the middle.  But it was the month of love and my original plan was to have softer colors in the quilt so I kissed the other two charm packs good-bye-for-now and opened up the beautiful blues and pinks of Papillon.  

I had two different thoughts on the color for the sashing.  Even though there is no yellow in this color line, I thought a pretty soft yellow might add something or I had some yardage of a light blue from the Papillon line.  

In the end I decided on the light blue.  Something about the yellow didn't flow for me.  Then it was time to get this thing sewn together.  I was itching to quilt something!

Next came possible thread choices.  My first thought was to quilt the center square with a matching thread color, but I decided to stick with the light pink and gray Aurifil threads and keep it simple.  The only thing left to do was decide on the quilting.  

 I auditioned 3 different possibilities for my blocks.  One of my favorite things to do is very dense quilting around something to really make it pop off the quilt.  I really wanted the churn dash blocks to stick out so that is the quilting option that won.

So after a weekend spent relaxing with Netflix I finally finished the mini quilt.  Not a bad way to end the month at all.  Now it's time to catch up on all of the new BOM for March that should be out.

Art In The Eyes Of A Child

The first quilt I ever made was a Turning Twenty by Tricia Cribbs.  Oddly, this quilt sits in our spare room and still needs the binding sewed on it.  Not sure how I let that happen but this story is not about that quilt...I digress.  The pattern was so easy (and it was the only thing I had pieced) so I thought it would be fun to take my daughter to the quilt shop and let her pick out twenty fat quarters of her choosing and make a quilt.  I believe she was around 7 or 8 at the time.

We were there forever as she buzzed around finding just the right fabrics.  After I had all the pieces cut, I had her hand them to me in the order she wanted them so that I could begin sewing it together.

As we figured out how she wanted them laid out I found myself asking her why in the world she chose the fabrics she did.  It was a crazy group of the most miss matched fabrics I had ever seen.  She had a reason for every single one because they reminded her of something she loved.  The strawberries made her think of the festival our town holds every spring. The brown one with holly made her think of Christmas.  There is one with blue, purple and green that looks like crackled glass that made her think of the ball at New Years Eve.  I was floored that she had put so much thought into what she had picked out.  

Sadly, this top laid around and collected dust for about 6 years.  I had decided that I wanted to be the one to quilt it since I wanted it to mean something to her even later on.  Finally in 2013 enough was enough and it was time to bite the bullet and finish it.  

I decided to do an all over quilting and was bored with stippling, so I gave loops and hearts a try.  Not too bad for my first time and take into consideration I had obstacles...

To this day she loves her quilt and even takes it with her to sleepovers.  I just hope 20 years from now she remembers how much fun we had picking the fabric out and what each little square meant to her.  She can forget all the yelling I did at the cat.

Globetrotting Finished

Back in November I asked my husband to help me pick out fabric for Pat Sloan's Globetrotting BOM.  He actually loves playing with colors as much as I do and this is what we came up with.

Then it was to the drawing board and searching for just the right Aurifil threads so that I could get started on the quilting.  

I probably have about 12-14 hours of quilting on this project.  This was the first time I attempted to keep track of how much time I spend on quilting.  I started with the middle section first figuring it was better to get it out of the way.

Next it was on to tackling the surrounding blocks.  

The strip of sashing separating the two center blocks of each row is slightly wider than the other sashing.  I remembered a great tutorial by Kathleen at Kathleen Quilts on quilting flying geese into a quilt and thought this would be perfect to highlight these areas.

And of course no project can be considered complete until the project manager has given his approval.

This is the finished quilt.  It feels good to say finished!