My Go To Color

You know you use a color a lot in your quilts when a friend hands you a fat quarter and says, I thought of you when I saw this (fill in your favorite color) fabric. In my case, the favorite color is a tossup between red and turquoise.

As a child I was drawn to red, especially for my coats; and as an adult I’ve made a quilt called “I Like Red.” But as I look around my living space I realize that I use turquoise and its neighbors (aqua, teal, etc.) far more than red for decorative sewn objects.

On a dreary day recently I amused myself by photographing the turquoise and turquoise adjacent objects I’ve made.

Silk pillow made from recycled skirt and cyanotype pillow from printed crocheted doily.

Quilt made of painted fabrics.

Japanese fabric and scrappy frames in a lap quilt.

Bowl for sewing machine supplies.

Even my shoelaces are turquoise.

And the quilt over my fireplace has turquoise AND red fabrics.

I think my love of vivid colors developed early. One of my favorite childhood Golden Books was called “The Color Kittens” by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s certainly not a classic like her “Goodnight Moon,” but I spent many hours studying the illustrations.

The illustrations are very 1950s.

My darkest secret revealed – why I developed a pouncy approach to color in quilts.

I’d love to hear about your favorite colors and how they came to be your favorites.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.

But I Don’t Like Brown

Every quilter has colors she’s instinctively drawn to or tends to avoid.  It takes considerable effort of will for me to work with beiges, greens, and browns. I love them outdoors but not in my quilts.  I’ve been forcing myself to use more greens, or at least buy more green fabric.  I do have a collection of neutral fabric awaiting my future low volume quilt. Please don’t ask when work on that will start.  So, that leaves brown.

I don’t mind reddish brown or purple brown or even gray brown when used sparingly, but until recently I haven’t even owned brown brown fabric.  That changed when I found two brown fabrics on sale for $3 a yard, and my penny pinching triumphed over my aversion to brown.  One of the browns is part of the grunge line, which I always buy whenever I find it in a color I don’t already have.  The other could be interpreted as a stripe, and I love stripes.

That stripey fabric found its way into a table runner that evolved from a demo I did on cutting and sewing pods a la “Quilting Modern.” Of course the stripes gave me grief as I wanted them to run all the same way, which required care in constructing each pod.  Try as I might, I can’t go against my granny’s lessons on matching stripes and plaids.  I tried to lighten up all that brown with aqua quilting lines.

Another piece I finished recently also contains a lot of brown but, since I was trying to capture the feel of a western canyon, it was entirely appropriate.  And I got to play with many permutations of brown.

Now I need to find some uses for my remaining 3 yards of brown fabric.