Sometimes I wish I understood color more. Not so much the color wheel stuff, but why and how colors work with each other. Case in point, this little quilt. Plan A was what you see to the above. Actually, this is Plan A1. Originally I was going to use the red you see in the border below for the inner border and the gold in the outer border.
Then I had the idea of using up the red scraps to make a scrappy inner border. So far, so good. But when I put the gold around it, I was...underwhelmed. It's okay, but not quite right. The idea was to pull out the golds and cheddars in the blocks. The red
happened to be still up on my design wall andI suddenly thought, hmmm, what if?
So then I tried the red as the outer border and the golds as the scrappy inner border. I like this much better, but I can't figure out why. It's trial and error on colors with me when I really would like a deeper understanding of why this second choice seems to work better. Is it just a matter of personal taste? Other people seem to talk so confidently about one color choice over another, but I always feel that I'm missing out on some basic understanding that others seem to have.
Color confusion aside, I'm pretty please with how this came out. I was determined to make this a totally scrappy quilt. Everything except for the lattice strips and two of the golds came from my stash. I wouldn't have thought that I owned that many reds, but when I started pulling out fabric, I found that I could have made many more blocks and not repeated any reds. Yikes! My stash is getting out of control.
I'm headed up to the sewing room to put this all together.
Have a wonderful weekend!
5 comments:
I have NO education about color, but no matter what quilt I've made, I LIKE what I've done in the border. Admittedly, I DO audition them, NEVER plan the border from the start as invariably my original plan doesn't 'do'!
And I agree, with your final color choice, and Like you, I don't know why. It's just pretty! 8-))
Diana it is a gorgeous quilt! You have done a wonderful job on it! Way to go!
I think part of the reason you like the second choice of borders better is because of the values- the lightness/darkness of the reds and golds. In the first photo the reds are about the same value as the brown sashing so they don't show up well next to each other. When you put the lighter valued gold between them the contrast pops them out better. Does that make sense?
And lastly, it sounds like your stash is just getting good :-)!!!
I don't have any idea about color either and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don't. I do say I like A better though. Just my opinion.
You like the 2nd one because it does exactly what you intended. The red outer border pops the gold in your blocks. when you had the gold outer border, that is where your eye stopped first. I was once told in a quilt class that yellow is a color where the eye can rest. so if you want to draw attention to a certain part of a quilt have yellow nearby. i'm no expert,but it sounds good.
and don't worry about your stash, until it requires its own building, it's not too big! LOL!
It should always be a "gut feeling" not a rule in the color book when you are choosing your borders. Some will make it sing, others will just barely do the job.
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