weekend project

Resurrecting yet another OLDIE Quilt top! (old posts here)

This was a quilt I put together from two stacks of layer cakes of Kaffe prints... 

when I originally did it, i thought... Who on earth made this quilt, it's so not me!

Well, I did, and I ran out of black, so into the BOX of forgotten quilt tops 

waiting for more black to arrive...

I think I've gone through 8 yards of black in the meantime...

 

I was still not happy with this quilt, and thought long and hard about 

what I could do to make it ZINGY!  I finally put the outer 6 inch border
of black around, and once I did that I knew what had to be done. 

There was plenty of MEDIUM tones, and the nice bright yellow to pop,
and it just needed a DARKEST DARK amongst the patterns to make it all POP.

Do you know what people mean when they say LIGHT MEDIUMS AND DARKS?

Look at this quilt in Black and white...

Lights mediums and darks does not mean, 

WHITE = BRIGHT or BLACK = DARK

Your LIGHTS can be a BRIGHT YELLOW A SOFT YELLOW,
PINKS, lighter tones of color.

And DARKS can be anything that has a strong VALUE of color.
It might be a red, or blue or purple or brown or orange...
it always totally depends on what fabrics you are using..

Do you see how all the red, purple, and even the black floral prints,

when you turn the image black and white, all those colors go gray?

I thought it was a big muddy mess when I looked at it before
I even looked at it in black and white.

Even though I had BLACK in it, it wasn't enough.

By adding a SOLID black, and more of it,
it now reads as the darkest VALUE of the quilt. 

The PINKS AND YELLOWS are reading as the whites...
and all of the other colors, red, orange, green, purple pink etc all read as mediums...

VALUE = is how light or dark a color is

Does this make sense?  I get asked questions about this quite a lot...

If any of you took photography in high school and developed
prints the "old fashioned" way... with chemicals,
you know in printing a black and white photograph you look for your
brightest white and your darkest BLACK to make a good photo.  

You then have a whole long range of colors that make up the gray tones...

Same sort of idea.

Now with the Aplpique, I am singnig a new tune over this quilt. 

It finally has that 

"ZOWIE!" feel to it! 

Boy what a difference that made!

 

So I sit here now with a KING size quilt in my lap trying to applique these bits on....

 Including my BELT from MY SWEATER! LOL!

Girl needs a hoop over here!

Have a fabulous weekend!