Color Value Woes Part 1

A couple of months ago, I happily cut into fabrics for a new quilt.  I wanted to stretch a bit and use a background that wasn't very light or very dark.  I don't have a picture of the yardage, but there's the fabric all cut out.

I love the red, orange and yellow together, and that background is rich but not too dark or light.  Looks good so far.

Next there was sewing and trimming.  So much trimming.  I think the trimming monster looks pretty good in these colors. 

Trimming monster

 The units look pretty good too.

Once all those geese were sewn and trimmed, the pace increased and blocks came together quickly.

Things were looking good and I was excited to sew blocks into a quilt top.

This is where I started to worry.  Something is not quite right here, but I thought adding the sashing might pull it all together.

Nope.  The shapes in the yellow blocks seem to fade into the background.  This fascinates me, because the yellow seemed strong enough when looking at individual blocks.  Let's see that again:

That looks sharp enough, but put them beside the much stronger red and orange blocks, and they look weak and ineffective.

It all comes down to color value.  Color value refers to relative lightness or darkness.  If you look at fabrics through a red filter, or apply a black and white filter to an image, you'll see the color value rather than the color.  Here's the first photo in this blog post with a grayscale filter applied.

When viewed in black and white, there isn't much difference between the background and the yellow (top left square).

Here's the design wall in grayscale.  

You can make out the shapes of the yellow fabric, but they are much, much lighter than the red or orange, which makes them fade into the background by comparison.

In color, you can see the yellow, but because it isn't as strong as the red and orange the design looks unbalanced.

This was meant to be the pattern cover quilt, but I don't think it's going to help sell the design!  I'll need to pick out different fabrics for a cover quilt.  This one is headed to the UFO stack until I decide whether to finish it as is (it will still be cozy on the couch) or try to find an alternate fabric to substitute for the yellow.

Have you ever viewed your fabrics in grayscale before making your final selection?  I knew about this, but never bothered with it.  This project and Color Value Woes Part 2, which I'll share in another post, are encouraging me to add that little step to my fabric shopping.  Cell phone cameras make it easy now, so I won't be skipping this step again!

I'm off to sew now, using fabrics that do not blend into each other!

Happy quilting,

Joanne

****UPDATE03/03/2025:  For more discussion of colour value and how to use grayscale to check it, read this new post.

Slab blocks for a pieced back

In Thursday's post I shared the start of the pieced backing for my Sliding Screen quilt.  If I have time to spare,  I like to use up scraps in a pieced quilt back.  It's a fun, low-pressure and low-stress creative exercise.  If it doesn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, it's mostly hidden on the back so no worries.

This time around I'm very happy with how it turned out.  I think I like it more than the top. Oops!

With that in mind, I decided to send the quilt out to be quilted with an all-over design that will play well on both sides.  I had planned to quilt it myself, but I'm not great at the style of all-over design that would look good on both sides.  The custom quilting I would have done instead on the top would look odd with the piecework on the back so the quilt wouldn't really be reversible.  

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Here's a bit more info about how this backing came together.

Many of my pieced backs start with one length of yardage the desired length of the backing. I add a pieced strip down the length of the back.  This makes the most sense when the backing will be less than 1 1/2 times the width of fabric (WOF).  This lets me buy half the yardage I would have to buy otherwise, and allows me to use up scraps from the top. 

In this case,  I didn't have any yardage long enough to span the length of the quilt, so I built some from smaller WOF cuts.  The different fabrics were all slightly different widths.  I could have just sewn them together, then straightened the resulting ragged side, then sliced the whole thing down the length.  

I actually find trimming long uneven edges to be a bit of a chore, so I chose to cut two segments from each piece of yardage then sew them together into two separate columns.  I could cut a 15" segment and and a 25" from the narrowest yardage, so those are the measurements I used for all the fabrics.  I matched centers and ends and pinned before sewing to keep the columns straight.   Note that one column is wider than the other, so that the improv pieced strip would look purposefully off-center.  I didn't want my longarm quilter to have to fuss about centering the top perfectly over the back to center the pieced middle column on the back.

Notice the wide plain panels at the top and bottom of the pieced center strip.  Those were planned so my longarmer wouldn't have to fuss about centering things top to bottom either.  Whether the quilt is loaded with more or less extra backing at the top, the top and bottom edges of the quilt top will fall somewhere within the dark brown plain panels, rather than ending up with a panel at one end, and cut off piecing at the other.

Piecing the center strip was a fun exercise in slab piecing.  I didn't measure anything. I just sewed two pieces together, then trimmed a side straight before adding another piece. 

Longer strip sewn to pieced section.

After trimming away excess

If I didn't have a piece long enough to span the side of the previously pieced bit, I sewed scraps into a longer strips until I had a new piece that was long enough.

I just kept adding scraps until I had panels the width I wanted.  If they turned out a little wider because of the size of the scraps, I just trimmed the panels down to size.  I needed the backing to be about 63" wide.  The side columns accounted for 39.5" (40" minus seams where the center will be sewn in) and vertical strips between the side columns and the scrappy center column to set off the pieced section a bit added 4".  With that in mind, I pieced the panels to be 20" wide, to finish at 19" wide.

Before I sewed the pieced column between the two side columns, I toyed with the idea of slicing the pieced column at an angle in a few places to insert some light strips.  I laid some strips across the panels to audition what that might look like.

I left everything on the wall overnight before slicing, because if I sliced, I couldn't change my mind!  Coming back to it all with fresh eyes in the morning, I decided the angled slashes would be more work for no added benefit, so I left them out.

The last step before sewing the columns together was to trim the center column to the same length as the side ones.  I laid the columns one on top of the other to measure and mark directly on the fabric, skipping measuring tapes.

Voilà, one pieced quilt back, nice and flat and square.  Well rectangle, but straight and with square corners :)

I dropped off the quilt top and backing for quilting yesterday and will have it by the end of next week.  Next task: make the binding, also with scraps from my stash.  

I'd love to hear if you make pieced backs. Why and how and how often?

Happy quilting

Quick gift project

Last weekend I made a set of coasters for my quilt guild's holiday gift exchange.  It was fairly quick, and I dug into my Christmas  fabric scraps to start getting into the holiday spirit.  A little bit of Christmas music on Spotify helped get me in the right frame of mind.

These use fabric squares folded into rectangles or triangles and no patchwork piecing.  I made some with the 4-patch design years ago.  I don't remember exactly where I found the tutorial at the time, but it may have been this one from the blog Quilt Piecer.  This year I saw the variation using folded triangles at AppleGreen Cottage here.  

I chose to add batting inside my coasters, which made them a little thicker, and made it harder to get crisp corners.  It bothered me especially on the triangle variation because the triangle points didn't end up quite in the corners as you would see in a pieced quarter-square triangle unit (QST). 

Though the tutorials didn't call for it, I added topstitching to embellish each coaster.  It helped make them less floppy, as well as drawing my eye away from those troublesome points.

I also added batting.  One tutorial suggested leaving it out, while the other used fusible fleece.  I just used scraps of 80/20 Quilter's Dream batting.  I will say fusing it to the fabric for the back of the coaster would have made things easier.  If I made these again, I might use just a touch of basting spray to keep the batting in place while I stitched around everything.  Not a huge deal though, and I could have used pins.  I just chose to skip them.

Another tip if you use batting:  pay attention to the order to stack the batting and assorted fabric pieces.  You stack the pieces, sew around the edges, then turn the whole thing inside out.  If you stack the batting inside,  between the fabrics at the start, you'll end up with batting on the outside of the coaster when you turn things inside out.  No need to ask me how I know.  Just look at the picture:

That's what happens when I don't read the directions and don't think through what exactly I'm trying to accomplish. This led to a little grumbling and seam ripping, but I really had no one to blame but myself.  

I gifted these at the guild gift exchange, and received a lovely hot pad, chocolate-peanut clusters and a jar of marmalade.  Not a bad trade, I think.  There isn't much of the chocolate left, and the marmalade will be lovely on my breakfast toast.

And I think I need to make myself a set of  coasters to keep...

What's your quick go-to gift project?  Or do you have an ornament pattern you particularly like?  I haven't decided  what to add to our tree for 2023, so I'm open to suggestions.

Happy quilting, 

Joanne