What's Happening in My Quilt Studio...

Recently I showed you the fabrics that I had pulled out of my stash for a new project.  I am pretty pleased with myself that the only thing I will have to purchase to complete this quilt is the backing.  Woohoo stash busting!

With the stars appliqued in place the layout came together.  Just giving you a little peak here as the "star" of the quilt is yet to be revealed.

I have had this sweet little boy print for quite a while and am so happy to be working with it.  Just makes me smile every time I pick it up.  I used it as the basis for choosing the other fabrics that appear in the quilt.   The blues and greens (and whites of course) can all be found in this main fabric.  That is a great way to find the fabrics for a quilt-if they work well in your main fabric they will they will come together well in the whole quilt as well.  And if you know your color wheel then you can also add a great accent.  In this case my beginning inspiration came from the the pattern I am using-which I will be revealing soon, but I just cannot give away the whole thing yet.  

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I have been learning to use my color wheel in planning my quilts.  As I said, I based my choices this time on the main fabric I had.  But you can also see  how these things come together on my color wheel.  Love this little one that was a freebie with some magazine subscription several years ago.  It sat unused until just last year when I decided it was time to learn more about color.  I had the funny notion that as a life-long artist there was nothing for me to learn about color - I learned how wrong I was and my quilts are improving because of it.  

For this quilt I turn the "key color" to my blue.  Notice then that I have some "colors that blend" to choose from.  Easy in this case,  go with the aqua greens.  The for a bit of POP- decided to throw in just a bit of yellow from the "triad colors" choices.  I could have picked a different triad color, but with a certain block that I have not revealed yet, yellow was the go to for this one.   Granted I was following a pattern here that did a good job of achieving that already- but I had a stash to work with and was limiting myself to that.  I can also use the wheel to branch out and design a quilt with a different color scheme.  And I did a good bit of playing with a variety of choices before settling on the fabrics I am using for this quilt.

Blasted stomach bug hit me this week (no pun intended, but once I wrote it...) so I have not made any progress since I snapped these photos last week.  But the weekend is here so between homecoming events I know where I want to be.

Taking a stitch at a time,
Deb