First and foremost, I am participating in Alyssa's Skill Builder BOM (Apparently this is pronounced "bomb?" I always say Bee-Oh-Em but you learn something new every day!) over at Pile O' Fabric. I wanted to participate last year but felt overwhelmed with other projects and intimidated by the fabric requirements. This year I figured it would be the one and only BOM I participate in for the year, and I've earned it by completing a lot of UFOs in the past few months.
So, I spent a loooong time playing around in photoshop with different color schemes. If you are wondering how to do this yourself, I took some screengrabs to show how to do it. (click to enlarge the screenshots).
First, place the image whose colors you want to play with into a new layer.
Select by color range. This works best in a pattern with nice solids like Alyssa's.
Here I have selected the yellow color range. The image shows a preview of what will be selected (in white).
Ta da! I have changed all the yellows to lime with the paint brush, making it really large. You can see on the left I created layers for each major color range and edited them in this fashion.
Time to show you some of the color schemes I auditioned:
This one was going for greens and purples. Didn't come out so hot.
More teals and deeper pinks. Better, but still one dimensional.
I liked the colors but it reads really nautical to me.
This one was one of the final two. It is very similar to Alyssa's original with some of the shades brightened.
The winner! I decided it would be nice to part from my usual insanely bright colors. This has a nice jewel tone palate. I am excited to try a quilt in colors that are less standard for me.
Yesterday I went out and bought all the fabrics. Yum!
We have dark plum for the sashing, and navy, purple, pink, teal, and lime for our colors.
Now the store also had a 40% coupon, but it had to be used on a print, not a solid. So, I went ahead and bought a panel I've had my eye on for quite a while.
Isn't is adorable? I may have to get coordinating fabrics from this fantastic line, but for now I'm just hanging onto this awesome print for future use.
Okay guys, we haven't even gotten to the heart of the goodies yet. Yesterday STLMQG had their Jan meeting, which included a raffle of books, fabric, notions, and even some sewn products. Everything in the raffle had been donated by members of the guild. Through this, we were able to find loving new homes for gently used items or fabric we no longer wanted, and were also able to pick up some great new stuff. I LOVE this concept.
Okay, I especially love it because I won big. Here is everything I got yesterday. I mean, seriously.
Most of this stuff was in one epic bag of notions, which I put a ton of tickets into. Check out all that stuff!! It includes fray block, some paper piecing hexies, borders on a roll, a knob to make holding your rulers easier, a connector to hook up two rulers, extra rotary blades, a mini iron, and sew much more!! Wow!!
I also got a die cutter. Anybody used these before? I am not too familiar with them but I can see their use if I am making a quilt that requires a ton of pieces of the same size and shape.
Also...fabric! 2 yards of Riley Blake, 3 one yard cuts of some lovely prints, a mini jelly role of white grayscale solids, and a fat quarter bundle of text prints. Whew!
So yes. I have a lot of new toys to go play with!
My first priority of course is to finish Bonnie Hunter's Celtic Solstice mystery. I've got half the blocks done, and am hoping to make a sizeable dent in the other half today.
I am glad I took the time to square up my pieces as I went. It added a lot of time, but I am a pretty sloppy sewer, and without squaring them up these would have looked terribly wonky. There are still definitely some blocks that don't have nice perfect straight seams, but for the most part I am satisfied with how these came out.
Okay, time for sewing!
No comments:
Post a Comment