Colour Inspiration Tuesday – explore with me the endless possibilities of colour for our quilts!

Welcome back to Tuesday! We made it! This past weekend we had a family celebration with my father turning 70, so blogging has had a backseat for a few days. But here we are, on the right day, and more or less on time! Yay!

Colour Inspiration Tuesday: Dancing Macaw

About the time I started the Clever Chameleon blog, I also started experimenting with free-motion appliqué. Free-motion appliqué was the homework of my very first Sweet Sixteen monthly meeting. During this time I drew up a number of critters I thought I would like to turn into appliqué designs. One of these fellows was this guy – a cheeky version of a dancing macaw. Macaws are magnificently beautiful, don’t you think?!

Needless to say though, learning to blog has been even more intensive than I expected, and I haven’t yet got back to developing many of the designs into patterns. (Some owls are an exception, more on that another day soon! And I did do a pelican quilt – do you remember him?). Anyway, when I found a photo of a blue and gold macaw on Unsplash.com, I knew I had to do a “Dancing Macaw” colour board.

The “Dancing Macaw” colour scheme is gold and blue. It is a beautiful example of blue and orange-yellow together. You’ll be hard pressed to go wrong with these colours on a quilt because they are complementary and therefore very eye-catching.

The only downside is that the macaw photo doesn’t really capture all the colours that I want to use for my macaw appliqué. So I went back to Unsplash.com and found another photo that makes pulling out the colours I want easier. So, without further ado, here is today’s second colour board: Summer Foliage.

The Summer Foliage colour scheme is blue, gold and green. Between these two new colour boards, I believe I will have no trouble at all putting together a collection of fabrics to appliqué my dancing macaw. What would you use these colours for?! Let us know in the comments below.

Maybe blue and orange is not your favourite complementary colour scheme…. 

How does pink and green suit you instead? Last week we looked at how to use red and green colours without accidentally evoking Christmas. 

Or you could check out the fun series we had recently – looking at matching colour boards to fabrics to express a variety of summer themes. Start here and follow the links to all five “summer crush” colour boards.

Credit

Today’s photos in Dancing Macaw hues are 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, the macaw photo was provided by Andrew Pons and the foliage photograph was taken by Jakob Owens. Be sure to check out their collections of photos on Unsplash.

Andrew Pons
Jakob Owens

For more colour inspiration for your quilts, follow along by subscribing to this blog by email (on the sidebar).

Or follow Clever Chameleon Quilt Colour Inspiration on Pinterest and pin your favourite colour palettes to try later. 

P.S. If you would like to use Andrew’s or Jakob’s photos 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.

P.P.S. Check out the other hubs of creative activity I am linking up with this week:
The Quilting Room with Mel
Freemotion by the River
Sew Fresh Quilts
Quilt Fabrication