Valuable Lessons Learnt Making the Lisbon Tiles Quilt

For my latest appearance on Sewing Quarter, I was asked to make the gorgeous Lisbon Tiles quilt by Jo Avery of My Bear Paw, which was featured in a recent Today's Quilter. As you can see below, Jo made her quilt in rich red and yellow scraps from her stash. 

I was asked to make the quilt in pretty floral prints from Moda, so I sorted out the colours according to the brief, the yellows and greens were like for like in the quilt which was fine, however, the pinks and blues were to replace the reds in the original quilt, which is where my quilt went in a different direction.

Once I had cut all the fabric pieces, I got stuck into a few hours of foundation paper-piecing, surrounded by the usual mess, am I alone in this? With all the trimming and different pieces, I soon find myself getting very untidy! Anyway, as Jo suggested, I made a few blocks at a time - the whole quilt is actually made of just one block, four of which make the star. As I made each block I laid them out on the floor beside me, and soon realised this was going to be even more scrappy that Jo's. 

Even though I tried to go for some pattern and had the red stars in the centre and four corners, with the blue stars filling the rest, I still think something was lost in having so many very similar prints close to each other, in some cases the star is lost completely. I realised that this came down to fabric values...

Fabric values, along with hues and saturation, are all interlinked in colour theory, and come in very handy with planning a quilt design. Hue is what people mean when they say 'colour' - red is a different hue than blue. Value refers to the lightness or darkness of the hue, so you could have reds of the same hue, but one is of a lighter value than the other. Whereas saturation is the intensity of the colour and is related to the hue and value. Fully saturated colours appear brighter and clearer, while less saturated colours are milky or greyer. A fully saturated yellow has a much lighter value than a fully saturated red. 

So if we apply this theory to my quilt, you can see that there is one red hue that stands out more than any other as it is the most saturated, while the other reds used to make up the star design are less saturated and very similar in value to the neighbouring yellows, making the overall star design less distinct.

When preparing for the Sewing Quarter show, I decided to make up another block using identical red and yellow prints for the four blocks to make up a full star to show how being less scrappy would give you a whole different look. As you can see above, I used the same strong red and yellow prints for the star shape, but still went scrappy for the smaller pieces. While I prefer this layout, I also still love the scrappy version I made for the show, and of course, just had to quilt it in wavy lines!

If you would like to watch the Sewing Quarter show with the riotous John Scott, you can catch it here on their YouTube channel. 

Wishing you all a happy and creative week, linking up with Let's Bee Social, Midweek Makers, Oh Scrap! and Needle & Thread Thursday