Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Part 8 A Life of Plenty


This is Part 8 of A Life of Plenty.  I wanted yellow flowers but was too lazy to go upstairs to go through the yellow bin. I found this orange that had enough yellow to make me happy.  The background is yellow, and the orange is nice and bright.

This block has more leaves than the pattern because I didn't like my spacing of the leaves, so I added more to fill in the spaces. Most of the other blocks have fewer leaves than the original pattern, so hopefully this one will show that I'm not that lazy. (A hundred years from now, nobody will know about the yellow fabric situation, and if they do, hopefully they will remember that it takes me longer to go up and down the stairs than usual now.)

I watched some episodes of The Quilt Show this weekend to commemorate National Quilting Day.  I realized why the modern and old fashioned fabric in the last block seemed to me like I was breaking a rule. I was! The rule is that you are not allowed to mix muddy colors with clear colors.  I actually break this rule all the time, but this quilt is supposed to be muddy colors.

We need to come up with a better term than muddy colors.  I loved Bonnie Hunter's use of a variety of background colors and even bought more lights to have that kind of variety. Then people started calling it Low Volume and it became a thing. I think that if we call muddy colors something better, it will become a thing. Who wants muddy quilts?

The background of this block is really old. It was bought in the days when all backgrounds were beige, or so I thought, before I had seen how Bonnie used other light colors besides beige. The green was used in The Earth Laughs in Flowers, and the blue comes from the 1857 quilt box.  I haven't used the orange in other quilts, but now there is plenty leftover to add to other quilts.


I used the background fabric in my fall wreath, which was my first applique quilt.

1 comment:

Pam said...

I love your progress on Life of Plenty. Maybe the background is old fabric but it is just right for the pattern and your choice of fabric for the applique. Very nice!