Welcome to the first ever Color Inspiration blog! In this new series, I'll be diving into the world of color and bringing you practical color palettes. Every month, I'll pick a set of 3 or 4 foundational colors to use in building out fun and expressive color palettes that you can apply to my quilt patterns or any future quilts. Keeping reading for some quilty inspiration!
For this month's color inspiration, I wanted to start with colors pulled from the cover quilt of this month's Pattern of the Month - Spring Garden.
The cover quilt of Spring Garden featured a fabric selection of these beautiful blues and pinks from the Michael Miller Cotton Couture line. Honestly, I think about this quilt often and have to talk myself out of using them in all quilts forever.
Of course, I didn't want to use this full fabric pull as a jumping-off point, so I had to narrow it down. I picked these four colors called Spa, Lagoon, Celestial, and Orchid from the Michael Miller Cotton Couture solids fabric collection. I felt like this was a good place to start since it had a good mixture of light, medium, and darks colors. Gotta love color theory!
In the first color palette, I wanted to show you all how I originally built out this full palette for the Spring Garden cover quilt. All fabric colors included in this fabric pull are used in my original Spring Garden quilt sample. My design inspiration for this was very much the Spring season. I wanted to make it my own spin on Spring colors! I typically lean more towards blues and purples in my quilting life, so it only felt natural to do the same for this! I threw in some mints and pinks like Mist, Seafoam, Iris, and Pink to give this palette a well balanced feel. I just love how well these colors distribute out in the Hurrication quilt mockup!
In this second color palette, I went with more jewel tones in saturated purples and oranges. I saw the original four colors as part of a sunset and ran with it! You can see how the addition of Raspberry, Shell, Coral, and Orange really brings the sun aspect into the color palette and gives it a lot of warmth. You can see that especially in my Deltille quilt mockup!
In this final third color palette, I kept to the softer, pastel tones but leaned more into purple instead of the teals/blues of the original Spring Garden cover quilt palette seen in the first section. For the purples, I knew I had to include Twilight, Blackberry, Jam, and Jewel - they are just such good colors! I love how they play off of each other in the Chevron Points quilt mockup.
Playing with color is one of my absolute favorite things to do! Being able to blend colors together to create such dynamic color palettes for my handmade quilts makes my creative soul so happy. I invite you to try out one of my March Color Inspiration color palettes in your next quilt! Whether you use the exact fabrics or use them as a jumping-off point for your own palette, I'd love to see! Share your quilts made with my color palettes on Instagram using the hashtag #RSQColorInspo or tag me in your photo. :)
Stay tuned for next month's Color Inspiration. Until then, happy sewing!
I'm so excited to finally have my second Garden Series pattern - Spring Garden - out in the world now! This pattern features flower blocks throughout with butterflies on each flower petal. Pair the pattern with your favorite springtime color palette and you've got yourself the perfect seasonal quilt!
This Art Gallery Fabrics (AGF) version of Spring Garden was the very first sample I made using the pattern! You'd think that most designers make their cover first, right? I couldn't wait to play around with these fabrics though!
Spring Garden comes in 4 different sizes ranging from Baby to Bed size and is Fat Quarter (FQ) and Half Yard (HY) friendly! This AGF Spring Garden Quilt is the Lap size version made with fat quarters since that's what fit my fabric bundle.
I enjoyed the mix and match process with this one a lot. I got to play around with the placement of the fabrics to make sure the there was enough contrast between the butterflies and the flowers.
The fabrics I used were the Eclectic Intuition collection by Katarina Roccella for Art Gallery Fabrics. Paired with it is Michael Miller Cotton Couture in Ochre for the flower centers. I just love this collection so much. The purples and blues are right up my alley and felt like a perfect match for Running Stitch Quilts!
I decided to go with my tried and true quilting - 1" straight lines stitched by me! I love the look of the clean lines and I can usually whip this kind of quilting out pretty quickly. Just attach your quilting guide and you're good to go!
I love how this Spring Garden turned out! It was so fun playing around with the fat quarters and colors in this quilt and I hope you have fun with it too! IF you haven't gotten your copy of the Spring Garden quilt pattern, you can grab the PDF version here and the paper version here! Make sure to share your quilt with me on Instagram and use the hashtag #SpringGardenQuilt so I can see it! I can't wait to see what you make!
If you want to read about the Spring Garden Cover quilt seen in the pictures below, you can head over to that blog for more information!
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Want a cute Spring Garden sticker? You can get yourself one here! |
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Spring Garden is the second pattern in my Garden Series. If you want to check out the first - Summer Garden - you can read about it here! Summer Garden is actually getting a re-vamp this month and the new version will be available in April after little TLC. The Garden Series will feature Autumn Garden and Winter Garden as well, which are both currently in the works. Make sure to check back soon for more updates about the Garden Series!
When I sat down to design this pattern, I really wanted it to feel springy. What better way to do this than to include butterflies? Each corner of the flower blocks throughout this quilt have cute, little butterflies made up of simple triangle shapes. I feel like this addition to the quilt blocks give the flowers so much personality!
Spring Garden is Fat Quarter (FQ) and Half Yard (HY) friendly and comes in 4 sizes ranging from Baby to Bed. For my cover quilt, I decided to go the HY route and made the Throw size version. The fabrics that I used in the quilt are Michael Miller Cotton Couture in the colors Spa, Celestial, Iris, Saturn, Seafoam, Mermaid, Caribbean, Marine, Pink, Lagoon for the flowers, Orchid for the Centers, and Soft White for the background.
For my backing fabric, I wanted to tie in a color from the quilt top but I didn't want a fabric that would compete with it. I decided on using Michael Miller Cotton Couture in the color Saturn.
The binding on this quilt is actually two different fabrics! I'm not usually one to bind my quilts with scrappy binding so this was definitely not planned. I originally intended to bind using Orchid to match the center fabric, but ended up needing to sub in Iris because I ran out of Orchid. There was a slight moment of panic, but I think it turned out okay! What do you think?
Last but not least - the quilting! I had the pleasure of working with Katie Hanson of Modern Textiles. You can find Katie on Instagram at @moderntextiles. Of course we had to go with a fun, springy panto on this one! She used the pantograph Floral Fun by Dastardly Line Quilting (@longarm.quilting.glasgow).
I had so much fun making this Spring Garden quilt! If you would like to make your own version, you can pick up the pattern in my shop now using the buttons below. Make sure to share your quilt with me on Instagram and use the hashtag #SpringGardenQuilt so I can see it!
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Want a cute Spring Garden sticker? You can get yourself one here! |
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Keep scrolling to see some more pretty Spring Garden Cover pictures!
If you want to read about the Art Gallery Fabrics version of Spring Garden seen below, you can head over to that blog for more information!
