Blame it on my sister! I love my sister Joanne and often ask her advice on my ideas. I wanted to do another scrappy quilt and asked Joanne to look at my "Scrap Attack" board on Pinterest and "vote" on some candidates for my next quilt. She looked at the board and said "Whoa! I didn't know you had pinned so many." and even tho' it was a task my sister came through with three favorites. One of them was a fan quilt. I've never made a Grandmothers Fan Quilt. So while I had, in the back of my mind, thought I would be using up already cut to size scraps, once I got this quilt in my mind I had to make it. Or am I making two? Sooo, as you imagine, I'm cutting lots of blades.
Why am I considering making two? I started with the blocks in the first picture. At first I was going to limit the colors to green, blue, red, yellow and purple. I liked those together, a little darker than I first pictured it but they felt rich.. But I wondered what would happen if I added one more color to each fan? So I took a blade off of each and added one more color to each. After that I found I preferred them without the addition of another color but this is what a design wall is for. (Pssst,originally I did have them on the design wall. I took them outside to try to get truer colors for the purpose of this post.) Then I asked myself if maybe I didn't need something a little lighter/brighter. So I did these four blocks.
And I like these too! To me the first blocks and the second blocks are so dissimilar that I can't see using them in the same quilt. Do you think I should make one with richer, deeper colors and one with the lighter, brighter colors? Or just integrate those darker blocks into a lighter quilt and hope the don't stick out like a sore thumb? Of course I could always use one set as part of the backing, or I could just make two quilt tops. What do you think?
And here is a picture of the top I made last week. I had better get to quilting. This years goal was to reduce the number of flimsys waiting to be quilted but between this month and last, I'm not managing to acccomplish that!
Don't forget to visit Judys linky Design Wall.
http://www.patchworktimes.com/
Enjoy!
Toni
What kind of layout are you doing? Can you alternate the dark and light blocks? They have the same colors but are just different values, so it seems like they should be able to play nicely together in the same quilt.
ReplyDeleteOr you could start on one corner with the lighter and then slide into the darker as you head to the opposite corner. OR, you could make two quilts. OR, you could make one quilt and a table runner. OR, you could make a table runner and two/four placemats. Am I helping?
ReplyDeleteIt's a beauty, sewing beautiful quilts :-)
ReplyDeleteAjka