Geri deGruy's blog of art, musings, and inspiration

COLOR!  OK, that's often...usually, the very beginning.  Some color(S) grab me by the mind and heart and the process has begun. I usually don't even have to be that close to the fabric...it calls me from across the room,"Hey, I'm gorgeous over here and full of colors you love. Don't bother with that other stuff!  Get over here!"  And I do. 

Shopping at Snappy Quilts last week, this colorful, jazzy piece caught my eye and was in my hands almost at the same time!

A fun, colorful city feeling fabric.  And I love all the squares.  Little squares, big squares, overlapping squares. This is the central, focal fabric.

Next, coordinating fabrics, really the most fun part of the whole process.  I love fabric and I love colors and finding direct matches and odd matches to fill out the piece.  So here are the fabrics I chose to add to this central city piece. You might say,"Peach?" It is the odd color, but it is actually featured in small ways in 2 of the fabrics, including the central fabric.

One of the color principles in art quilts is to try to have some lights, some mediums and some darks. To tell if you have a good balance of these, you look at the grouping with squinted eyes.  Immediately the darks and lights become clear and the mediums fall in the middle.  This might sound stupid.  Of course you can tell the lights from the darks, but sometimes a fabric will fool you.  It looks dark, but when you squint, you notice that it has a lot of light areas that make it more of a medium. The point of the color gradients is to have enough contrast and enough balance to make the piece pleasing, consonent.

So here I am with all these fabrics.  I know I want a fairly big piece of the central city fabric somewhere.  In this piece I decided to make strip-sets of the other 8 fabrics.  No, this has nothing to do with taking off your clothes!  You cut strips of the fabrics, same size, different size, even, not even... whatever you want, and sew them together as one piece, like this:

Now I have an interesting block of materials to use.  My strip piecing is uneven.  Hmmmmmm. Sometimes I'm not such an accurate sewer. Oh well. I can still use it.

From here, it's harder to describe how to proceed. I begin to experiment with putting groupings of fabrics together. I have a design wall where I put all my experiments.  It helps a lot to see the pieces together on the wall, like a viewer would see them.  I can see what the piece needs and get a better idea if the whole thing flows together. 

Here is the piece so far.  Not quite done but close.

Because the fabrics are busy, I used a lot of black between sections to give some separation and structure. Using a lot of cut strip-pieces means a lot of smaller units so I added some large units of solids and patterned pieces...sort of grounding spots.  The most prominent of those is next to the focal piece and really becomes part of that piece, calling attention to it. 

See how the peach adds a pop that would be missing without it?

Now I need to add finishing touches to the  piecing, pin on a backing and some batting inbetween and quilt it, and put a binding on to frame it.  Then, whether to hang it with a sleeve on the back, or mount it on a painted canvas.  Decisions, decisions!  I'll post the finished project when it's done.