The Color Story for my Hand-pieced blocks

When I looked at the block pattern for this block–it was November in the original set for Bonnie's Quilt-Along–I thought the challenge would be getting those long points right.  It turns out, hand-piecing those point was easy and the real challenge was choosing the fabrics.

There has been some discussion of "my colors" for this block, so I thought I'd blog a bit about it.  Before this project, I'd never used a printed fabric to guide my color-selection process.  I decided to try it, using the Laurel Burch fabric.  I collected tone-on-tone fabrics that were the colors I saw in the print, including prints, hand-dyes and batiks. I added black-and-white prints.

I choose the fabrics, block by block, with no advance planning ... which I know could make putting them all together in the end more challenging, but it's just more fun for me this way. In each block, I include the Laurel Burch print, a black and white print and fabrics in colors from both sides of the color wheel.  It's easy to see that in the November blocks, since there are only four fabrics, that means, one cool color, one warm color, one black & white and the focal fabric.

You might notice that some of my blocks have a lot less contrast than others.  I don't mind included a few muddled blocks in the mix, like the one with the pink points.  I think the repetition helps you see those points and the fuzziness may make someone looking at the quilt take a closer look. You often see muddled blocks in antique scrap quilts. Including them somehow makes me feel that my quilts are continuing that scrappy tradition. 

Most of the blocks are made from more than four fabrics and I noticed that I tend to put together blocks from fabrics that are predominately warm, like this one that I finished last night, or predominately cool.  I always follow my rule of including at least one warm and one cool colored fabric in each block, along with at least one black & white print and the Laurel Burch fabric.

This is the first December block. My plan for Slow Stitch Sunday is to select and cut fabrics for another of these to work on tonight.

Also finished this week were the two October blocks below I really could have cropped those better so they matched like they do in real life, huh?

For anyone who wants to take a closer look at the individual blocks, check out m Flickr photo set for the Quilt-Along 2010.

I've now finished 31 of the 36 blocks planned for this project. I hope to be finished piecing this set of blocks and working on some new hand worked project the next time Slow Stitch Sunday comes around.