Going In Circles

Have you ever felt you were going in circles?  I do a lot.  It seems that I get up, go to work, come home, make dinner, and go to bed only to get up and start it all over again!  Sometimes it's my mind that goes in circles -- thinking about one thing and then another and back to the first again.  Please tell me that you feel the same way -- I'd hate to think I'm the only one with issues like this!

This study in yellow that I did with an online group a while back must have been done in one of those periods as was the quilt in the previous post.  It seems I was obsessing about circles at that time or at least making quilts using circles..

Our first assignment was to create a design and do it in black and white.  This was done with various paper. I had to get creative to find the values I wanted.  Some were cut from magazines and some were even the inside of envelopes copied in black and white on the copier.

The second assignment was to start with yellow and add black and/or white to it.  Though the example was done using papers, I first mixed yellow acrylic paint with black in varying degrees and white in varying degrees to see what tints and shades were made when mixing the paint. Then the challenge was to find papers of the same color and value that were created with the paint.  This was the result of that assignment.

Our next challenge assignment was to use the colors next to yellow on the color wheel going either direction.  I chose to go toward red so that various values of orange were part of the mixture.  I believe I ended up painting some of these spaces as I could not find paper the right shade of orange or red/orange.

We were next to do the same design using yellow and it's complement -- purple, again using various values in the piece.  I bought a lot of scrap booking paper for this one.  The magazines just didn't seem to use much purple so cutting the shapes from magazines wasn't going to work in this assignment.

The final assignment was to create a small quilt using yellow and our the design we had worked with in the paper mock ups.  Since I LOVE blue and yellow together, this quilt is the result of the yellow challenge.  Apparently many people are afraid to use yellow.  I've used it a lot because well, I already told you I LOVE yellow.  It's been one of my favorite colors for as long as I can remember.  I called this little quilt Mellow Yellow because I think it is a pretty "laid back" quilt even with as much yellow as is in it. You may notice that the binding changed color with the piece on the edge so that it almost disappears. That was a chalenge, too!

What do you think?  Was the study in yellow worth the effort?  Other than the fact I wish I'd had many more papers to choose from, it was really a fun thing to do.  It did take quite a while to complete, but I was happy with the little quilt that resulted.

What is your favorite color?  Have you ever done a study of it to see what happens when you add black or white to it?  You might be surprised.  It is also fun to go what I call through the color wheel mixing two complements.  I've done that with fabric and die and the colors you get can be a surprise.  Try it, you might like it.

Hope you are having a Mellow Yellow day!

Until next time,
Lois