Let me explain.
There is this quilt I wanted to make for my godmother and I wanted to make it according to her likes and wishes. So, it should be in brown, with some red and orange, too. And it should be not too fancy, not too busy or crazy, rather calm (if you can say it about a quilt).
After lots of thinking and sketching and going through various ideas I finally came to the conclusion that the best way for me to do it would be to make a bed size version of my first frost mini but in brown and with several more appliqué leaves of various shapes and sizes (red and orange, and maybe one little yellow one too). So I bought some nice brown fabric (#browncanbenice). I cut most of it into strips of various width. And I tried and tried, and tried to arrange the strips so that I'd be happy with them but to no avail.
*really crappy photos alert - I didn't think I would need to share them*
I didn't like the almost-random-but-trying-not-to-have-too-big-clumps-of-the-same-fabric look.
I tried arranging them from light to dark, but somehow that didn't work either.
Apart from the fact that the light patches are a bad idea, in the top version these two prints (links to online shop photos, just so that you can see them better) seem to be rather jarring. And the second one, the brown squiggles, doesn't look too good in the bottom version either.
After exhausting (for today at least) the ways in which I could arrange them horizontally I tried some others, like herringbone:
but I'm not too keen on either of the two versions above.
One more idea I have is to make a string quilt similar to Ashley's but I'm not sure if it would look OK in only 9 brown prints plus a creamy almost solid for the thin centre strips.
Or maybe I should stick to simple square in square blocks? (I mean something like mini log cabins, with a square in the middle and one round of contrasting print around it).
So, as you can see I'm stumped and I'd love to hear your suggestions. Please.
Here is a link to a quilt I very much want to make, I bet you could do something like it with brown too: http://blueisbleu.blogspot.ca/2013/07/cream-courthouse-steps-quilt.html
ReplyDeleteI love brown and I wonder if part of the problem is that you don't see this as working yet. I love your original mini and think with the right browns it would work. Maybe consider adding some tans too?
Have you seen Emily's (Strawberry Patch) bee blocks with the navy and LV log cabins? Would this work with the browns and red/orange in the centres?
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