Choosing Colors for Projects

I'm working on defining a color scheme to match the Villeroy & Boch Design Naif porcelain. 

It took me many years, piece by piece, to collect a full set of this design.  

Snapshot of some of the images on the dishes in this collection.

The goal is have a color guide to pick fabric to make matching placemats or other dinning room accessories. 

I use an app called ArtRage on my iPad to pick these colors.  I import a photo of one of the dishes in the collection and use a feature in the app to select and match the color with a color picker.  Then I digitally paint these colors to create a sample file I can print out to use as a guide to match against when looking through fabric choices. 

This sample was made using the paint brush tool in ArtRage. 

The pastel crayon tool. 

The wax rayon tool color. 

The paint roller tool. 

The ink pen tool. 

I used multiple different tools to paint the colors because even though the colors are all the same, the tool used gives a different appearance.  

I'm considering these basic colors to work with. 

Once I decide on the colors I wish to accentuate, I may design companion fabric in a simple geometric pattern to make other kitchen and dinning room accessories. For example color coordinated dish towels or napkins. I could also design a tablecloth pattern and have it printed at Spoonflower. 

These are all just ideas and possibilities but I plan to simply start with finding matching fabric in these general colors to make a table runner and placemats. 

Thanks for reading.

Aileen

A Bunch of Little Quilts

I've been sewing up a small storm of small quilt projects.  First I used up all the leftover fabric from the St. Patrick's Day placemats project that I showed in my last post.  Then I used up some random pastel squares and triangles I had from other projects with some old Easter egg fabric to make a couple Easter themed placemats. 

The completed green mini quilts:

Random scraps.

Tiny one inch squares.

Some leftover two inch squares.

More random leftover pieces.

This Easter egg fabric I've had for several years. I made a quilt square as a table centerpiece with it several years ago and I look at it now and wonder what was I thinking.  It's so bright!

I used fabric colors that matched the bright colors in the print and they really really stand out. When I decided to do something more with this fabric I choose matching pastel fabric and less of the Easter egg print to tone down the overall effect and these Easter placemats are much calmer. 

There are leftover pieces from at least seven different projects in this block.

But the backs of these quilts are bold. 

Besides doing holiday themed placemats, I also put together a quick one that my son would like from this neat matrix like fabric. No patchwork here, just neat prints. 

Thanks for reading.

Aileen Biser