Hope and Love Progress

Back when I was teaching quilting classes, one of the things that was important to me to share was that it was ok to change the colors. I had friends who only bought kits because they didn’t want to change the colors. I had friends who, if they had a quilt pattern and the fabric line/colors used in the model quilt were no longer available, they wouldn’t make the quilt. It’s ok if those are the colors you really wanted to use but it’s not ok if it’s because you’re too afraid to change the colors.

In classes, I would tell the folks . . if I passed out a pattern that required 5 blues, 5 tans and 5 greens, you would probably all choose 5 different blues, 5 different tans and 5 different greens but your quilts would all be beautiful. Don’t let the color choices paralyze you!

My favorite colors are purple, green and gold. I often worked with the editor of a quilt magazine and she would tell me . . use any colors you want to use EXCEPT purple, green and gold because those were the colors I most often wanted to use. Everyone who saw my quilts probably thought they are just awful but I love them. I’m not giving specifics but I think one of the things that turned me off from quilting was this: I had submitted a design to a magazine and, because the fabric companies were always wanting to promote their designs, they asked me if it was ok to send fabric for me to use. I said yes. It was an accident on someone’s part because we had been in Texas for quite a while. The fabric either got sent to my address in Missouri or to the rental house where we had first lived when we moved to Texas before we found a house to buy. By the time I realized that I should have had the fabric, contacted the people I was working with and they figured it out, the original package was lost. They had to get more fabric from the company and send that and it gave me about two weeks to get that quilt pieced, quilted, bound and back to them. I seriously was working day and night on it and it was colors I did not like at all. At that point, I said . . I will always work with colors I like and if no one likes my designs/models, that’s ok with me.

But, when I started cross stitching, in the beginning, I always tried to use the called for floss. Then I ventured off a bit and if the called for floss was a bright red of one brand and I didn’t have it and happened to have a similar bright red of another brand, I would use that. One thing that differs a lot, in my thinking anyway, is that in quilts, there were reproduction designs/lines, there were 30’s designs and lines. There were the different fabric designers that had their own patterns and, for someone who liked brights, it was sometimes hard to use a pattern that was created for a reproduction line and use super bright batiks. In cross stitching, for a lot of the charts, the colors can be totally changed and it will still be an amazing finished piece.

I will admit that I am not great with color. I don’t pay any attention cools and warms or the rules of the color wheel. I choose what I like. I may choose to use three blues, where a chart has used one blue. I have given up struggling to find the perfect white that will show up on my linen. If white isn’t going to show, I’ll just use pink or yellow or something that works.

One more thing for me is that some of my favorite cross stitch designers are The Scarlett House, Teresa Kogut, Brenda Gervais and others and I pretty much always love the colors they choose for their designs so I don’t often find the need to change colors.

Here’s my progress on Hope and Love. It’s a crooked picture because it’s still in the frame, and the frame was sitting on my lap at an angle (late night photo). I changed the red house to a blue house and I love it. I’m happy that the front of the house is one blue and the side where there was a bit of a shadow (I’m guessing that’s why the front of the house on the chart is red and the side is a brownish red) is a blue that’s a bit darker – just a bit . . not much but enough that it looks like there could be a shadow on that side of the house.

It will probably be the weekend before I finish this one. We have things to do all day today that won’t involve stitching. Tomorrow is my day to stitch with Debbie and this is not the project I will be working on.

I’ll be happy to get back to it when I can and get it finished!