Red is a Neutral

Since I'm not doing much actual sewing I thought I'd keep my blogging muscles working by doing a quick post reflecting on the Red is a Neutral challenge.

This is where I got to in the end.

Sadly it seems to be a difficult top to photograph and the bright sun here has washed out the colours too much.  I'll try again when it's cloudier.  In real life there are a pale green and a lovely lemon-y yellow which are virtually indistinguishable in this picture (though you can get a better idea here).

It's been an interesting exercise for me but I think on balance I'm happy that I met the brief.  There is a lot of red in this quilt but for me it works to enhance the blues, greens and yellows rather than demanding to be the centre of attention.  It's a useful notion to have up one's sleeve - that red can be used instead of, say, low volume options. 

I have also learned that if I stick with the same block for too long I get bored, then I kind of lose the will to sew at all, so if I want to work along these lines again I will need to build in variety, either by making more than one block or by changing scale or some other jiggery-pokery.

Red, Two Blocks, and Chinese Coins Mashup

The border of the Square Deal is finally done. I hope. After a few months in time out, I changed a few blocks in the outer border to get better definition. Now they move from crips delineation at the bottom left to more diffusion at the top right. {EDIT: I retook and replaced the photo. This one is better but now a bit cooler than real life. Sigh.}

The Square Deal quilt top

The center mixed some Chinese Coins that just didn't make it as a quilt with HSTs in every shade of solid red/peach/pink in the stash. The triangles are all ruler cut although {if I'd been thinking} free-hand might have looked better.

The crosses are Sujata's Lattice design from Cultural Fusion Quilts and they were scissor cut. My crosses widen with each set. The first ones were so narrow that the seams overlap after pressing but the last few are superhighways!

Does that mean I finished three improv invitations at once?

1. Chinese Coins {because those were the original units for the striped triangles} 
2. Two Blocks
3. Red is a Neutral (because I played with several fabrics before deciding red looked best with those striped triangles}

"Red" stretches it a bit. These reds all read as foreground rather than background. Must {and will} try again.

Also posted on my blog.