Sew Joy: Color Play with String Blocks

This month my Quilt Guild's block lottery block is a string block. We make two, one for the winner of the lottery and the second goes to our guild's charity group - Quilter's Who Care. The blocks are made into quilts to be donated in the community so it's a win win!

I started my string blocks with yellow and thought it was a fun color play challenge to make them look very different.

Yellow is a funny colour - some people love it and others don't. It can be quite moody and relies on it's fellow fabrics to give it a real presence or to tone it down. Let's see how I did!

fabric strips overflowing from a shoe box

First, it does depend on your stash of strips what you can create. For some reason I just happened to have two long strips of yellow fabrics to use to start my string blocks. You can tell from my shoe box full of strips that I really don't have that much yellow!

bright fabric strips block of warm and cool strips

The bold yellow strip was easy to find fabric strips to go with and keep it shining bright. I have a lot of bright fabrics and in this case I ended up adding warm colors to one side and cool colors to the other. Could I keep this pattern going?

The second string block went in a very different direction. There is always a need for masculine looking quilts for the charity quilts so I took this to heart when searching for strips to go with this yellow string - as obviously the other one went pretty bold and bright! Could I tone down this yellow?

First I sought out darker looking fabrics and ones with prints. I didn't want an ugly block, but I did want to play down the yellow by choosing colours that didn't compete with it. The complementary purple and then the brown leaves strip both make the yellow more approachable. I kept looking for prints that would play well with the others and intentionally avoided alternating bright colors with the dark prints.

This block feels more like I went for a dive in the scrap bin, don't you think? It has a cozy feel to it in spite of the dark colors which I think comes from the variety of fabrics used.

Then it was time to trim the blocks square. I started with a backign fabric a bit oversized and used my Tula Pink 12 1/2" square ruler (pink with a unicorn in it!) to square up the blocks. I trimmed with the right side down so I could see the backing fabric - plus it was lighter and easier to see the ruler against.

The results?

I like both! If everyone else also started with a yellow string, what a happy quilt it would be. The darker strips look a bit brighter beside the bold block and the bold block, well, it doesn't stick out that much thanks to also having those cool colors in it.