Loves Pink - Part 2

In my last post I talked about the initial stages of making my sister Leslie’s quilt. What I failed to stress is how important a role my future mother-in-law was in the success of my quilt. Without her patient instruction and enthused encouragement I would not have been able to start or finish my project. Thank you from the bottom of my heart Ann!

Picking out the fabric didn’t end with my search online. I realized that I wanted to have many different color pinks, many different patterns, and that it would be impossible for me to do so by buying online. Often websites have a minimum of ½ or 1 yard per cut of fabric. While this is great for some projects, it was not what I needed for my sister’s quilt since I wanted a lot of variety but only needed a few 4x4 squares of each one. Sure, I could have bought a bunch of different fabrics online but I would have ended up with yards and yards of extra fabric. Here's roughly the look I was going for with as many different patterns as possible:

Thankfully Ann was more than willing to let me look through her stash. Wow! What a stash! I found some perfect additions to my growing pile of fabrics for Leslie’s quilt from her bag of pinks and reds. I didn’t use any of the reds but I thought this was a clever way to organize fabrics. One of these days I’ll post about fabric organization…We also checked out the local JoAnn Fabrics store and I found a few fabrics off the bolt and a few pre-cut fat quarters.

I finally had the right variety of patterns and colors to begin cutting and piecing my blocks together. You may be wondering how I selected my fabrics. I guess you could say that I’ve always had an eye for what looks good together. I attribute this to a natural ability to analyze the following key elements:

(Key Element - how I used the element in Leslie's quilt)
Color - pinks ranging in color from more red to more purple, black, white
Saturation - pure black, pure white, intense/bright pinks mixed in with a couple more subdued pinks
Contrast - high contrast between the 3 colors
Texture - all cotton quilting weight fabrics
Cut - fits within the 4x4 block (nothing too big)
Pattern - all of the fabrics except for the pink used for the border and lattice had some sort of pattern

I will save the details for each of these elements for future posts. Check out my next post about the lessons I learned as I made Leslie’s quilt!