Have you noticed how an absence of colour can bring out the drama and depth in a picture or design?
And emphasise all the details? I am one of the biggest colour lovers out there, but I also recognise that colour can sometimes be a distraction from the other features of a fantastic design.
Seeing something in black and white really helps to distil the important elements out of a picture, don’t you think? What is it about the subject that makes its form distinctive and recognisable? Where are the contrasts and shadows that give the subject that “wow factor”? How can I use those features in my next quilt design?
Toasty Teal: More Colour Fun with Stitched in Color
Do you remember, waaaay back in August, we had a lot of fun with a fabric and colour challenge? Every so often, Rachel of Stitched in Color teams up with an online fabric store to run a mosaic contest where you are challenged to choose 9 fabrics to best represent a particular theme and present it to the world. Last time we explored the theme “Summer Crush”. Now you and I have the opportunity to do it all again! But this time the theme is “Toasty Teal”. I really hope you will join in the fun!
Toasty Teal……?
I love the colour teal. I also adore aquamarine and turquoise. And I am not always entirely sure which is which, or where the boundaries are, all being stunning variations of blue-green. It probably doesn’t even matter a great deal for this exercise, as teal is just the starting point for our inspiration. But just to silence any worries, here is the colour that Wikipedia defines as Teal: hex#008080. Teal is the deepest of the three related colours.
Teal is one of the colours I pulled from this photo for the Silhouettes at Sunset colour scheme
As Rachel so ably points out in her preamble to the challenge, teal is a very magnificent and versatile colour. It is fabulous with copper and rust and orange. I also like to pair it with purples or with variations of it’s complement, maroon. Teal sings with dusky pinks and peachy hues. For me teal is strongly associated with water and beaches, and as a regular performer in the most spectacular of sunsets. This teal challenge was triggered by Rachel’s thoughts around autumn, but it is early summer here, and we have already done our fair share of sweltering. But that’s ok, teal works great for toasty summers too. 🙂
My first round of fabric choices….
So with all this in mind, I perused the fabrics at this challenge’s sponsor’s shop, Bobby Lou’s Fabric Factory to make a mosaic that captured these sentiments. Of course, I also preserved my natural tendencies towards fabrics that celebrate playfulness. So, without further ado, I present to you my first mosaic: All Creatures Great and Fall!
My first go at the “Toasty Teal” challenge
Did you notice the pineapples I slipped in there? If you don’t know why, you have some catch up reading to do about the Pineapples vs Quilters conspiracy. hahaha 🙂 Start here to follow this slightly silly thread right back to the beginning, which was actually the post “Digging for Pineapples“, from the last mosaic challenge. Hmmm, anyway, moving right along……
My decision process…..
I started with the Lil Fox print from Michael Miller Fabrics. I really love the little toadstools in among the happy foxes, and the touch of purple of their coats against the teal. Nothing says autumn to me more than fungus. I can never resist taking pictures of curious fungi.
Then I added the buck heads (Art Gallery Fabrics), the petite raccoons (Blend Fabrics) and the hexagons (Art Gallery Fabrics) to emphasise teal and other blue-green tones in the mosaic. At this point there were 3 animal prints already, so I decided to see if I could find more. A seahorse print in coral pink? Perfect! And jellyfish in marine tones? Oooo yes. The jelly fish also pick out the yellow green of the flowers with the foxes. Both of these picks are Michael Miller Fabrics.
Now, to get some colour continuity I wanted to pick out some more fabrics with coral colour……enter the llamas and a hot desert sun by Free Spirit. I just loved adding this fabric, as it not only added support for the coral on the seahorse fabric but added some dark contrast, and extended the blue and blue-green colours by adding green to finish the analogous colour series. And of course, it is just. plain. fun. 🙂
I then added the stripes (called Trinket in Blush by Art Gallery Fabrics), that look like they should be on the llamas’ blankets. These stripes tie a lot of the colours together in one print. Happiness! For the ninth fabric I originally chose a cute snail and leaf print by Free Spirit that added more purple to the palette and screamed autumn to me. But it was really just a tad too busy. Then I found the aforementioned pineapples in oasis by Me+You. As if they were not going in! Sorry snails, you are out. You would make a great backing though!
A very hard choice……
And then, at the very last second, I relented of the pineapple silliness, because I found this beautiful bird print from Art Gallery Fabrics instead….. and if I was lucky enough to win this set, it would make more sense to create something with the birds rather than the pineapples. But I have to admit to being quite torn between them. Perhaps I’ll put the pineapples in my second mosaic…… Of course, let’s be honest, if I was in store right now I’d just buy them both. Hahahaha. 🙂 Here is the selection that I finally uploaded to Stitched in Color….
Want to join in? Come on, it’s fun and good practice!
There are several great reasons to join in this challenge, including two chances to win a fat quarter of each of the fabrics you use in your mosaic! You have until the 10th of December to enter up to two Toasty Teal mosaics in the contest for your chances to win. You can find all the details and the linky here.
Really you shouldn’t need another reason…. But apart from a chance to win fabric, I particularly like and recommend this exercise because it is good for the creative grey cells. As it happens, one of the photos Rachel used to set her mood was the 100th winner of a regular photography challenge run by Mark Wilson at Gizmodo. And Mark’s philosophy towards challenges with tight boundaries is this:
“I was always frustrated by the weekly assignments I’d had in my college video classes, never understanding why I was forced to tie one hand behind my back, creating a story in a single shot or without use of dialog. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized I’d had the rare opportunity: to do isolated workouts for my creativity, to play with a single idea for that single idea’s sake, and, sure, to sometimes fail but have a fantastic excuse as to why I did.”
I see Colour Inspiration Tuesdays and related activities, such as Rachel’s mosaic challenges, in much the same light. Stretch yourself creatively, just a little, often. Gradually, you will grow your design skills, become practiced at finding inspiration and develop your own authentic creative voice. So, don’t pass up this easy opportunity! Do it!
Credits
The photos I used to set the Toasty Teal mood in this post are all from Unsplash. If you would like to use them for your own purposes, they are available to you, no strings attached. You don’t even have to acknowledge the artist who provided them, although I think we should if possible, don’t you? Follow the individual links for each photo, or you can easily find all of these photos and more in my Colour Inspiration Tuesday collection.
Secondly, Joy at “Days Filled with Joy” is running a short series of 12 Days of Last Minute Christmas Gift ideas. Head on over to see what you can make for the people on your Christmas list. Or if you have a suitable tutorial, let her know ASAP, as she is currently looking for projects to feature. You’ll like Joy, I promise!
If you would like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I find all over the internet, you can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Thanks for your support!
“Necessity is the mother of invention”. A saying so old that its origins are lost and the first recorded instances of this phrase are in Latin. Yet its meaning holds just as true today as when it was first penned/quilled. And it is an amazingly widely applicable truism! It is just as true for my husband’s work in leading edge communications technology as it is for mine in the more traditional arts and quilting.
Necessity is also really the mother of quilting. After all, quilting traditions are firmly rooted in the process of rescuing and recycling fabrics and other textiles to generate bed covers to keep warm. It is only in relatively recent times that quilting has become a pastime for those well off enough to acquire beautiful new materials specifically for making a quilt.
Finding Quilt Inspiration in the Everyday: Day 26
If you are not feeling inspired to quilt, it’s possibly time to do something else for a while. But it may also just be a case of having too many choices. Too many fabrics., too many patterns, too many ideas. Too overwhelming.
I find that having no boundaries and no restrictions when I am looking for a new project can be daunting, sometimes even crippling. If I have a set of expectations or project guidelines, creativity often comes to me more easily…. and the project is less likely to go UFO.
Necessity and constraints
Most of us do not have to quilt to make do and keep warm anymore. But necessity and constraints can keep a project interesting. These parameters can take many forms. Here are a few I can think of:
a tight timeframe. This may be an impending birth or milestone birthday. A departure or perhaps a quilt show deadline. Nothing like a hard date to get a project moving! Here is a quilt that I made for a departing friend….. the front is a relatively straight forward braid. The constraints…. colours I thought my friend would like and that reflected Australia. And the departure date.The reverse side of this quilt was made of panels that I embroidered with messages from as many relevant people as I could gather. At the time I had never free-motioned text onto fabric before – but I managed it, on time, because I had to.
size and subject. If you have no idea what to do next, find out what the next challenge quilt at your local show is going to be. Even if you have no intention of entering! Working to a theme can do wonders for focussing down on a project. These two quilts were both the result of show challenge themes.
Quilt theme: South Australia, Ocean to OutbackQuilt theme: Nine Patch
mistakes and poor preparation. Now I don’t recommend looking for this kind of motivation. It will come looking for you from time to time though. And it’s up to you what you do with it. Some amazing quilts come about because there wasn’t enough fabric to finish the original plan.
The pattern of this quilt had to accomodate three unintentional changes in fabric due to the time elapsed as it was made and the unavailability of the original fabrics!
Another circumstance that I know forces ingenuity to the surface is when bad mistakes are made at the fabric cutting stage.
And then sometimes, things just don’t go to plan (possibly repeatedly). One of the most satisfying quilts stories in my life was a disaster to begin with. I was asked to fix a sentimental quilt project that had suffered a number of ills at the hands of its original creator and another quilter. In the end, the only thing for it was some appliqué over some holes. But the final result was very good, and the pleasure of the rescue was enormous.
budget or purchasing constraints. What can you make if you can only spend a certain budget? Only use your stash? Or a loved one’s clothing? What about a quilt made only from scraps?
A quilt I made entirely from a friend’s scraps, with the exception of the black sashing and the binding. I gifted the quilt back to her as a surprise. 🙂
How about trying to get your supplies for an entire quilt top from one location you wouldn’t normally shop from? A while back, I joined in a challenge to choose 9 fabrics in the theme of “Summer” from a specific Etsy shop. I found all sorts of fabric I would never normally have considered. And I enjoyed it!
One of the collections of 9 fabrics I chose to enter in the Summer Crush competition.
Necessity can be good for creativity. It forces you to think outside the box. And of course, once you have set your rules, they are only there to be broken! And that can be part of the fun too! 🙂
What helps you start your quilts? Special events and milestones? Do you like quilt challenges? Or are you a pattern browser? Tell us your great ideas – you might just help someone get past their quilters’ block…..
Colour Inspiration Tuesday – Weekly Inspiration and Colour Happiness for your Quilting Mental Fitness!
Hi! Welcome back to Tuesday! Doesn’t it roll around quickly!? Today we are going to exercise the little grey cells and treat them to some beautiful colours along the way.
Mental exercise is good for your mind. Luckily for us, mental exercise can be waaaaay more fun than the physical sort! Keeping your mind active can be as fun as learning a new sewing technique. Resizing a quilt pattern. Or exploring new colour combinations. Anything that takes you out of your mental comfort zone and requires you to do some actual thinking rather than just consuming information or watching TV.
This week I have been stretching my mind by learning new techniques (playing with trapunto), and thinking about what to explore next for Colour Inspiration Tuesday. I finally settled on some strawberry flowers. These flowers remind me of the time when I was a country teen and had a huge patch of strawberry plants that I grew from a few runners my maternal grandmother gave me. I used to water them, mulch them and even feed them with cow dung that I collected and pre-soaked in buckets of water! And the little fruits were ohhhhh soooo sweet. Accessing happy memories is good for your mental health too!
Colour Inspiration Tuesday – Strawberry Vines
In honour of happy memories and mental exercise, today we have the “Strawberry Vines” colour scheme and an accompanying free-motion quilting motif to try. “Strawberry Vines” is a green, yellow and pale grey-blue colour palette. The blue is so subtle it looks white unless there is real white up against it. Go on, have another look at the photo. The main colour captured on the strawberry flower is not really pure white is it?
Anyway, I decided against designing us another quilt idea this week. The truth is that there are many good ideas floating around in Colour Inspiration Tuesday already. And I would like to have an honest go at some of them. Without the weight of new ideas to cause drag or distraction. But I did want to still give you something…… I am ever so grateful to you my readers and especially to my growing list of regular followers for coming by.
So, this week’s idea for personalising your quilts is….
Looking at the strawberry flower picture and remembering my garden with the hundreds of plants and gently tending the runners until the new plants had roots and planting them too, made me think of quilting strawberries, strawberry leaves and flowers on a continuous line. Strawberry Vines. Wouldn’t this be a lovely finishing touch for a quilt in summer colours or pastel tones? Or on reds, pinks and greens on a girl’s quilt? Do you remember the Strawberry Shortcake character from the 1980’s? A quilt in her colours!
Strawberry Shortcake…. 35 years old(ish) and still scented! This little darling now belongs to my daughter.
Strawberry Vines Quilting Motif
So I started doodling on paper and came up with my first go at such a design. Followed by a quick experiment on a fat quarter left over from Jewel Tone Diamonds and some waste cotton batting.
The three elements I used were leaf triplet, a small flower with the characteristic star in the centre between the petals, and of course, strawberries. As you can see, I tried the strawberries with and without seeds.
Strawberry Vines quilting motif
One of the things I like about my new impromptu design is that any gaps that get missed or are too hard to fill in with continuous quilting can be filled in with a curly “strawberry runner”. How good is that?!?
On my next try, I think I will round out the leaves a bit more. I know that strawberry leaves also have zigzagged edges, but that level of detail doesn’t interest me for quilting. The flowers were a bit tricky, I went through several methods to try to quilt them neatly. Here is the path that worked best for me. Start by travelling into the flower centre, and add the petals second:
A strawberry flower quilting path. Note, I have added gaps where lines would normally touch or overlay each other, so that you can easily see the pathway.
Don’t worry if you need to place more than 5 petals around the centre to finish the flower. Strawberry flowers can have 5, 6 or 7 petals. It’s the flat shape of the petals with the triangle gaps between them that make them so distinctive.
The other important thing to remember is to round off the tops of your strawberries where they meet the leaves. And don’t make the berries too symmetrical…. otherwise they look like acorns with the wrong caps instead. Or maybe persimmons. At least to me.
Next time I play with this motif I want to add flower buds as well. I have a UFO in colours not unlike “Lily Pad Glow” that might look nice quilted with this motif. What would you use it on?
Don’t need strawberry vines quilting motifs this week?
“Strawberries! How dull. Wake me up when you are quilting something interesting… like flies! Flies are cool!”
Today’s photo of strawberry flowers is from Unsplash.com. Unsplash is a collection of free, high resolution, “do what you want with” photos. Credit is not required, but I’m sure you’d love to know who is being so generous with their talent. Accordingly, this photo was provided by John-Mark Kuznietsov. Be sure to check out his collection of photos on Unsplash. John-Mark Kuznietsov
I hope you have fun trying out this strawberry vines quilting motif. See you next time for more quilting fun!
P.S. If you would like to use John-Mark’s photo or another Colour Inspiration Tuesday photo for your own projects, you can easily find all the Unsplash photos from Colour Inspiration Tuesday in one place for free in my Colour Inspiration Collection.
You are invited too. Come and see what lots of craft-loving people are sharing on the net this week!! Here’s one of my favourites from the parties so far: Project Sew a Jellyroll by Patchwork Sampler
In July I started a tumbling blocks quilt in solids. This is a little unusual for me. I tend to work in batiks, but I was unsure whether I would take to sewing Y-seams or not. And I had a particular plan to recreate a quilt idea that had occurred to me during a Colour Inspiration Tuesday. So I stocked up on some relatively cheap solid fabrics and cut a stack of diamonds with my AccuQuilt GO! cutter.
Tumbling Blocks Quilt stalled as other things hit the priority queue. Time to finish this off!
I got it mostly sewn, and two tutorials on the process written (about Y-seams and about tumbling blocks quilt construction) before life interfered and things stalled on this project. Now it’s time to get it done.
My goal broken down:
I have all the tumbling block quilt units I need, I just have to finish sewing them together.
Then I need to buy fabric for the borders and the backing, and get the quilt top finished.
Finally, I will layer up and pin the quilt sandwich and stabilise it with stitch in the ditch quilting.
That is where my goal ends. However, I reserve the right to completely finish the quilting on this one, but it is not part of my official goal this month! We have to be realistic! 🙂
Do you have a quilt goal for September? If you do, share it with us here in the comments below. And consider joining us at Elm Street Quilts for some accountability (and be in the running for a prize as well!).
I hope you will share what you would like your September 2017 chapter of your Quilt Story to be!
P.S. Also linking up with Main Crush Monday at Cooking up Quilts and Free-motion by the River. Come on over and find out what other people are working on this week.
Toasty Teal: More Colour Fun with Stitched in Color
I love the colour teal. I also adore aquamarine and turquoise. And I am not always entirely sure which is which, or where the boundaries are, all being stunning variations of blue-green. It probably doesn’t even matter a great deal for this exercise, as teal is just the starting point for our inspiration. But just to silence any worries, here is the colour that Wikipedia defines as Teal: hex#008080. Teal is the deepest of the three related colours.
I started with the Lil Fox print from Michael Miller Fabrics. I really love the little toadstools in among the happy foxes, and the touch of purple of their coats against the teal. Nothing says autumn to me more than fungus. I can never resist taking pictures of curious fungi.
Now, to get some colour continuity I wanted to pick out some more fabrics with coral colour……enter the llamas and a hot desert sun by Free Spirit. I just loved adding this fabric, as it not only added support for the coral on the seahorse fabric but added some dark contrast, and extended the blue and blue-green colours by adding green to finish the analogous colour series. And of course, it is just. plain. fun. 🙂
Until next time…..
31 Days of Finding Quilt Inspiration in Real Life
The reverse side of this quilt was made of panels that I embroidered with messages from as many relevant people as I could gather. At the time I had never free-motioned text onto fabric before – but I managed it, on time, because I had to.
Necessity can be good for creativity. It forces you to think outside the box. And of course, once you have set your rules, they are only there to be broken! And that can be part of the fun too! 🙂
Don’t worry kitty! We are looking at quilting bugs later on this week. 
