penny-studionotes-2

In the top photo, I'm trying out a darker blue for the flowers--still not as dark as the leaves and stems, but dark. The second photo is the same as in my previous post--flowers are a medium blue, but a little too grayed out for my taste. A detail of the dark plus darker blues: I will let this sit for a while. I think I'll still try to find another medium blue, but if I can't find something, I think this dark blue will work.

Here's the decision I made about the colors for the narrow inner border and the applique, incorporating helpful suggestions from Cookie and from Mary Beth. I knew I wanted to include more red/orange somewhere, and kept trying it in the applique flowers, but Mary Beth's idea to go more monochromatic in the applique (so as not to compete with the center of the quilt) led me to move the red to the inner border (Cookie's preference). I wanted more variation than all dark blue for the applique border, so tried out medium blue flowers with everything else darker blue. I'm happy with this. Except that even with visits to two quilt stores, I didn't find a medium blue that I'm entirely satisfied with; I only have a few scraps of the fabric from the one medium blue block. I think I will hold off on cutting the shapes until I have a chance to try another store or two. This will hold things up, but I'd rather wait and get the color right. Oh, the other helpful sugg...

I made a decision on the colors for the inner border for the appliqué quilt (red/orange) and for the colors within the border (medium blue and dark blue)—thanks to Mary Beth for helping me figure this out! I'll put up a photo once I've gotten some of the appliqué basted on the border. I didn't have enough of the red/orange and medium blue batik, so I went over to Peoria yesterday to get some more fabric. The quilt store in Morton is next door to an excellent yarn shop, Ewe-Nique yarns. I went in just to look around, but ended up spending an hour there and came out with two new projects. This store has a lot of samples knitted up, so you can see how things will come out, which is really helpful. I've knit since I was a child, and always have something on needles, but I stopped knitting garments (other than sweaters for babies) a while back, as I was so often disappointed with the final results. The sweater might look just like the pattern, but it didn't look g...

I found a pattern in a book about stenciling that I think will work well in the border of this quilt--it is similar to some of the shapes in the applique, but doesn't duplicate any of them exactly. But what colors to use? My first trial is above, all in dark blue. I'd like to get in some of the other colors, though--rusty red, lighter blue, dark green. I spent the morning today cutting out shapes in various colors and trying them out. Here are a couple of options with a view of the whole quilt; then I'll show some close-ups. This one alternates red and blue in the flower shapes and uses green for the leafy shapes on the outside. This one puts the red flowers on the outside and blue in the center. I also tried out a solid curvy line down the middle rather than the broken line, which was determined by the stencil-nature of the original pattern. I think the broken line works better for the quilt as well. There's also the question of the color of the inner border. O...