Even MORE Veggie Designing (Getting Closer!)

Yes, I spent even more time last night toodling around on my computer.  I won't regale you with the long and winding tale of all the color schemes I tried out, but I finally ended up with one that I like.

It turns out Adobe Illustrator has an incredibly awesome tool that uses fancy math to create perfect color schemes for you.  Select a color, and it provides a whole list of great schemes that match that color.

I finally selected the following color scheme, which brings in some purple, greens, and veggie colors of red/coral. Then the color guide gives a range of tints and shades! So great!

Ah, I must backtrack a bit.  I was sitting and staring at the cover of my book "Stunning Angleplay Quilts"and thinking about how the color scheme of the cover matched well what I wanted to attempt in my quilt.

Suddenly I realized that the solution to my problem of what blocks to use was staring right at me! I had an entire book of over 40 cool optical illusion quilt blocks! I ended up choosing one called "Marigold," which I think has a lot of opportunities for cool 3D effects while allowing to use many colors in one block.

Then I created this scale drawing in illustrator to play around with coloring. If I were really advanced in Illustrator, I would be able to create "global colors" so that I could change all the colors in the doc with one click, but I didn't get that far. Maybe next time!

Then I took my color palate and went crazy!

The borders will have more - I like to wait until the center of the quilt is made to figure them out. However, I am thinking the edges of the background might need at least some kind of pieced design, to help make those pinwheels less stand-alone and more integrated into the quilt as a whole.

Then I popped in some of the veggies that will be in the quilt to see how it looked with veggies in it.

 What do you think? Right now my eye is drawn more to the pinwheels than the veggies. However, I really like the colors of the pinwheels! Also to stick to the color scheme you have to take some liberties with colors, such as the pink carrots.

Then again, I am a person who really loves bright quilts.  Working with this more subtle color palate might be tough for me and means I won't be able to use much of my stash. So I think I am going to run off and try a brighter color scheme, more like the cover of that book. Stay tuned!