Colour Inspiration Tuesday – Colour Your Mood, Brighten Your World, Design Your Quilt.

Welcome to the third day of our Summer Crush fabric mosaic journey. This week we are looking at matching fabrics to summer-themed photos. The fabrics in question are the current stock of Quilt Sandwich Fabrics on Etsy. The Summer Crush mosaics are inspired by a contest being run by Rachel of the Stitched in Color blog. Genius and fun, all rolled into one idea!

On Tuesday (the real Tuesday) we looked at a colour scheme I called Ice-cream Tones. I ended up with a mosaic of nine fabrics that I think perfectly capture the colours of summer sunshine and berry-flavoured ice-cream. 

Yesterday (I know, it was a Wednesday, notTuesday), we looked at the colours of pineapples on the beach. I chose beautiful fresh colours from among all the fabrics at Quilt Sandwich, and shared why pictures of pineapples and beaches have a special meaning for me.

Today (I know…… still not a Tuesday) we are going to explore fabric colours inspired by the most fun photo of the summer pictures I collected from Unsplash.com. I am calling today’s quilt colour scheme “Flamingoes in the Pool”.

Colour Inspiration Tuesday: Flamingoes in the Pool

The “Flamingoes in the Pool” colour scheme is hot pink, slightly-less-hot pink, rose, aqua, teal and pale salmon. These are happy, bright colours; begging you not to take them too seriously. A bit like the Digging for Pineapples palette from yesterday, they are fresh and uncomplicated, and will work as a stand alone palette or as bright patches within large neutral or white spaces. 

A detour to “Flamingoes love Ice-cream” colours

To begin with, I struggled to find fabrics in the Quilt Sandwich Fabrics Etsy store to fully express the Flamingoes in the Pool. So, I got distracted with this fabric of bowls of ice-cream sundaes in similar but brighter colours.
This fabric in from Robert Kaufman.

Anyhow, I decided to use this fabric as my muse and see what happened when I built a mosaic using these colours.

 

I do love this, but it is not what I set out to do…..

Back to “Flamingoes in the Pool”

With a bit more effort I was back on track. Here is my Quilt Sandwich Fabics version of the Flamingoes in the Pool colour scheme.

And here is the fabric mosaic I made….

Then I decided that while the ice-cream sundae fabric really “isn’t me”….  (I’d totally use them for a child though), I also decided that I really like the lift the yellow fabric gives to the flamingo colour palette. Combining the ideas of Flamingoes like ice-cream and Flamingoes in the Pool, I came up with these two very similar offerings.

These are my new favourites. See how this works? Quilting Your Own Story is a process. Not too many people wake up with a fully formed idea in their head ready to go. Playing with colour and design is a process, an evolution. It happens when you are doing, not when you are waiting for ideas. So you should hop over to Stitched in Color and participate in this contest (or the next contest if you are here reading archived material).

I don’t think I’ll use either of these as my second entry to the Summer Crush mosaic contest though. I have one more idea to pursue tomorrow….

Summer Crush Mosaic Colour Inspiration Week

If you want to follow my thoughts around the Summer Crush mosaic contest for the rest of the week, I will be adding the links here. 

On Tuesday we looked at the colours of Ice-cream Tones. Pinks and yellows, with a little brown and blue added for interest.

On Wednesday we looked at the tropical colours of Digging for Pineapples. Orange and yellow and beach colours. Very fresh and refreshing.

Check back tomorrow for my last Summer Crush fabric colour palette ideas. Update:  Friday’s mosaic is called Hazy Days. More beach colours, but more sedate than tropical pineapples and flamingoes.

Credit

Today’s photo of the pineapple on the beach is from Unsplash.com. Unsplash is a collection of free, high resolution, “do what you want with” photos. Credit is not required to use the photos, but I love to give credit where credit is due, and am always grateful to people who contribute to open source communities. So I would like you to know that this lovely photo was provided by Vicko Mozara via Unsplash. Be sure to check out his collection of photos on Unsplash.com.
Vicko Mozara

For colour inspiration for your quilts in your inbox weekly follow along by subscribing to this blog. 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 Vicko’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.