You Really Didn't Think...

 You really didn't think I would make a quilt so uniformly ... Blue, did you?

SURELY, my regular readers would expect me to put in some sort of joke...

Or visual pun,

Or anomaly,

that MAKES YOU LOOK!

Surely you all know that I love nothing more than breaking the rules while following them at the same time. Above there is indeed one purple triangle. It's been in the photos all along, but you have missed it because....

VALUE SUPERCEDES COLOR!

(Nyah, ah, ah!)

So, for those of you who missed it, you can often substitute a different color in your quilt as long as it is the same VALUE. Most people will miss the difference, because it looks like it belongs. It DOES belong, because it is the same VALUE.

So the title of this quilt is: Needle in a Haystack.

As in, Needle? What needle? Where?

I love to put surprises in my quilts to reward viewers who are paying attention.

SO, why purple? Well, there are some pinks in this quilt, in the light blocks with the insects and beetles and the lotus leaves. 

Pinks are really light red-violets. You can see the relationship in the photo above. I tried this red violet block in the quilt but it didn't "hide" as well as the purple did when lined up with the other blue triangles.

As you can see.

Purple is a mixture of blue and red, so the purple block fit in with the overall plan. Of course I used a fairly nondescript print so it wouldn't draw too much attention to itself.

THIS IS IMPORTANT...

WHAT I WANTED was for the different block to DISAPPEAR with the others. I wanted it to be there, but I WANTED it to HIDE. I wanted viewers to notice it if they looked hard enough. Had I WANTED it to show off, I would have used the red-violet block. This was a conscious choice. The color, the print, the location for this block were all specific, conscious. and deliberate choices.

When YOU make YOUR quilts, you have choices too. WHAT do you want your quilt to say? How do you want your quilt to LOOK? How do you want it to FEEL (visual feel, not texture.) As Yogi Berra famously said, "If you don't know where you are going, you will end up somewhere else."

I knew what I wanted this quilt to be from the very beginning. The choices I made were choices that would make that idea come to life. It is very important to know that when you make a quilt, or any other piece of art.

Kill Your Darlings...

 

Sometimes no matter how much you like something, you have to recognize that it doesn't work and you have to get rid of it. In the block above, the color of the flowers in the blue triangle on the right match (and thus blend) perfectly with the blue in the fabric on the left.

This kinda breaks my heart as this fabric is the inspiration for the entire blue quilt. 

You can see that blue flowered triangles in the layout above. You can see that they attract the eye right away, and they also do not "read" as blue. There's a white flower up there, that is surrounded by blue and it reads as a "hole." That's a no-no.

Here I have covered up those flowered fabrics and the design really shines. What I want in this quilt is to emphasize the sharp blue triangles. Without those flowers, what you see is TRIANGLES. Which is what I want.

I also removed the light blues in the above blocks. These light blues "read" as too dark and were too close in value to some of the other blues that were used as "darks."

I ended up discarding 20 blocks, which is 12% of the total blocks on the design wall, so I had to make more blocks before I started to design the quilt for real.

And one more thing:

Am I the only quilter who has ever done this?

And I did it TWICE!

Blue Grows

 

As I watched a movie over the weekend I pinned some blue triangles together to sew together later. I think there were almost 50 of them.

I added them to the ones already up on the design wall. These rectangles are about 4" x 8". I have to fill the design wall full of blocks, so I will need 135 in total. I need about 40 or so more blocks.

I am liking this very much.

New Blue Quilt

 

I ordered a bunch of lovely blues and I have been thinking of what to make with them. Here are the middle range blues. 

Finally I figured out what I wanted, and I would need some light blues too, so here are some light blues.

In 2015 I made this quilt from scraps, and I always liked it. The first question was how big did I want the triangles to be:

The triangles on the right are 9" tall and I thought they were too big. The ones on the left are 8" tall, and I like the fact that they lean to the right.

One of the things I liked about the inspiration quilt was the bright colors in the light fabrics, so I went through my stash and found a few I thought would work. I've started cutting some pieces, but I have a lot more to cut.

I'm looking forward to playing with this shape and the blues.