Just for fun. I'm still working on and thinking about the scrap quilt. I don't have as many scraps as I thought, or as much variety as I thought. The red/blue/brown color scheme would be heavily weighted toward blue (light) and pink if I rely on the scrap boxes. I've also got a few more orphan blocks than I remembered, and I really want to include them, although they don't seem to fit yet. Maybe these can be the start of my doll quilt wall - much better idea. Anyway, I think I'll keep making blocks with the scraps I've pulled, and then pack it all up again until the scrap pile has what I need.
I read Color Harmony for Quilters by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr last week, and it's really influenced how I'm approaching projects. They discourage the matchy-matchy appproaches of using a single collection (egad!) or pulling a color scheme from a focus fabric, and recommend instead that quilters begin with a theme that they want to convey and explore how it can be achieved through variations in contrast and hue. Their illustration of more than a dozen themes with quilts and the methodical breaking down of quilts into simple palettes is, so far, the best outline of a creative approach to selecting colors and fabrics I've come across.
Something else that has been going through my mind since Sunday has been symmetry and variation. The idea of symmetry is interesting: where are the fold lines? how much additional repetition is there within the repeated pattern? I'm also thinking about what makes some symmetrical patterns interesting, and others boring -- I guess that is the central question. I'm also thinking about integrating odd bits: how they can become part of the design without losing their difference, what they contribute to the overall impression. These thoughts are sometimes about stained glass (rose windows in our church), sometimes about quilts, and sometimes about society - mostly all mixed up together.
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