Silhouette Quilt Along – Week Two – Choose Your Colors!

Hi there Quilt-A-Longers!  This second week of our silhouette quilt, we are focusing on color. Last week, we picked our background, and by doing that, resulted in what size quilt we are going to be making. Below you will find what which each selected for our color achrmes, and we cannot wait to see your choices!

Shelly’s Stuffs

While everyone’s getting some fabric together for their background I wanted to share some quick thoughts on what I think makes a good background for a silhouette quilt.  I tend to gravitate towards blenders and tone on tone for most of my quilts but especially for silhouette quilts. And of course I’m a total ombre junkie so I’ll probably arrange the fabrics I’ve picked to do a rough fade from one end of the quilt to another.

I like to steer away from anything too dark or with any black in the print.  I think that where the silhouette lays on the darker fabrics near the bottom it can reduces the impact of the silhouette and the overall quilt a bit if your background gets too dark.

That said the selections I made for this current quilt still include some darker prints (had to use that charm back I won at guild!).  I might make my silhouette a little smaller and place it off center on the quilt to keep it away from those darker prints if it feels like it needs it once I start putting it together.

Stacy’s Stuffs

This will be my first silhouette quilt, so I’ll be learning right along with you all.  Are you as giddy about it as I am?! I’ve wanted to make one for a long time and always pictured a sunset background with some sort of scene or location.  My original thought was to try and replicate the awesome sunsets on a warm summer Iowa evening, with all the purples and pinks and orange and yellows.

But I also wanted to be able to do this with precuts.  So, I decided on the Northcott Stonehenge Sunglow fabric line in 10” squares (layercake).

There are only 5 different colors in this layer cake, so i intend to mix them up but keeping the darker colors to the bottom, and lighter to the top – generally.  I do intent to mix it up a little bit to give it some interest, instead of just putting all colors together

For the silhouette itself, I will be using a straight black fabric.  Simply because I already have it!!

Theresa’s Stuffs

As we saw last week, I went all kinds of scrappy for my silhpuettequilt. A scrappyquilt can be pretty simple (dump ALL the scraps out!) or difficult (which scraps work well together?)

I dumped my scrap bin out!

For my sky, I wanted to have the light shades towards the middle of the quilt, with the darker shades on the outside. I asked myself how dark the sky really is during the day, but I couldn’t get the shading difference if I went true-to-life, so I made it my own shades of blue! One blue-ish color I tried to stay away from was the teals, but I did throw a couple of those in as well.

I divided my scraps into light, medium, and dark, and then chose equal amounts of each (mmmm….coffee….):

So, although teals didn’t appeal to me to look like a sky, once we start piecing the On-Point rows, it will be fairly easy to tell where each piece is going to go in order to keep the shading.

For the buildings, instead of going scrappy, I chose one gray per building. As luck would have it, I had some leftover metallic gray! Yay! I also used a couple of gray prints as well as a.solid reading piece. I kept all of the grays for each building different:

Of course, this is your adventure so even if you choose one fabric for the sky or go scrappy on the grays, it’s going to be epic!