Color Play with String Blocks - Yellow

 

This month my Quilt Guild's block lottery block is a string block. We make two, one for the winner of the lottery and the second goes to our guild's charity group - Quilter's Who Care. The blocks are made into quilts to be donated in the community so it's a win win!

I started my string blocks with yellow and thought it was a fun color play challenge to make them look very different.

Yellow is a funny colour - some people love it and others don't. It can be quite moody and relies on it's fellow fabrics to give it a real presence or to tone it down. Let's see how I did!

First, it does depend on your stash of strips what you can create. For some reason I just happened to have two long strips of yellow fabrics to use to start my string blocks. You can tell from my shoe box full of strips that I really don't have that much yellow! 

The bold yellow strip was easy to find fabric strips to go with and keep it shining bright. I have a lot of bright fabrics and in this case I ended up adding warm colors to one side and cool colors to the other. Could I keep this pattern going?

The second string block went in a very different direction. There is always a need for masculine looking quilts for the charity quilts so I took this to heart when searching for strips to go with this yellow string - as obviously the other one went pretty bold and bright! Could I tone down this yellow? 

First I sought out darker looking fabrics and ones with prints. I didn't want an ugly block, but I did want to play down the yellow by choosing colours that didn't compete with it. The complementary purple and then the brown leaves strip both make the yellow more approachable. I kept looking for prints that would play well with the others and intentionally avoided alternating bright colors with the dark prints. 

This block feels more like I went for a dive in the scrap bin, don't you think? It has a cozy feel to it in spite of the dark colors which I think comes from the variety of fabrics used.

Then it was time to trim the blocks square. I started with a backign fabric a bit oversized and used my Tula Pink 12 1/2" square ruler (pink with a unicorn in it!) to square up the blocks. I trimmed with the right side down so I could see the backing fabric - plus it was lighter and easier to see the ruler against.

The results?

I like both! If everyone else also started with a yellow string, what a happy quilt it would be. The darker strips look a bit brighter beside the bold block and the bold block, well, it doesn't stick out that much thanks to also having those cool colors in it. 

This was a fun challenge for me to see if I could add some color play to making my block lottery blocks this month.

 

How do you like to play with color?

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With Joy,

Sarah V.