I said I was off to square up blocks, but it’s really not my favourite task, so I took a wee break to brainstorm Baby Jane colour schemes! I was going to play around with my colouring pencils but they’ve gone walkies, so I went geeky and used a spreadsheet instead!
Here are my first 4 ideas:
Ok, the next bit is quite long winded – sorry! I’m trying to work out what layout and colours to go with and I’m really quite stuck… Feel free to skip the rest, although if would be great if you had any comments or ideas. This is such a massive project that I really, really don’t want to mess it up and regret my design!
Now I know this is a traditional quilt, but I’d like to use modern fabrics and play about with the layout a bit so that it ends up looking less traditional.
So first up, layout. I really like the way this quilt has an off-centre diamond and I’d like to do something similar. I’d originally thought of having off-centre squares, but now I’ve tried a diamond layout, I think I prefer it.
In the original quilt, I really struggled to see the around-the-world pattern and initially though the block colours were random. I prefer logical to random so would like to make the layout more obvious. With a square layout, each round has more squares than a diamond, so I think this immediately makes the layout clearer. But I’m still preferring diamonds. Perhaps making each diamond 2 blocks wide would make them more visible?
Next up, colour. Now, if I ever finish this quilt, it won’t be living with hubby and I. Hubby is not a fan of this particular quilt and doesn’t want it in our flat. That’s fair enough – there are lots of other quilts I’d like to make that he’d love so I’m happy for this quilt to live elsewhere. So I’m going to make it for my parents house. I’ve wanted to make them a quilt for a while now and am pretty sure they’ll love the design. So this one’s for them.
All the blocks are made from 2 fabrics and for me, the background will be white, because I need to keep the costs down and Ikea’s white Dvala sheets are nice and cheap! For the foreground, I would L.O.V.E. to use hot pink and baby pink, but my Mum doesn’t like pink, let alone my Dad so it needs to be something else!
The quilt will be going in a room with yellow walls, hence the use of yellow in all the above ideas. Plus I like yellow, and although it’s not pink, yellow is good 
If I’m going to be working with one quilt for the length of time I’m going to be doing this for, then I want to like the colours (is that fair enough?).
To make the layout more obvious, I’d like to keep the number of foreground colours down. I’m thinking two (oh, that was obvious from the pictures?!) but I’m not sure about the second one. Orange? Blue? Green? A different shade of yellow? Brights? Pastels? The carpet in the room is beige and there’s some red and green in the curtains and the furniture is all pale-coloured wood, so I’ve got a fairly wide choice for the 2nd colour.
I don’t know. If anyone has made it this far, then I’d love to have some opinions. When you think of “modern”, what do you see?
Not good.
