Scrap Basket Sunday and A Tutorial (sort of )

It's another Scrap Basket Sunday with Kim!  Please be sure to visit her blog and click on the links to the other quilters that are showing their projects.  

My Scrap Basket Sunday includes a new project and a tutorial, sort of , on how I choose fabrics for a project.   

I love the Button-Up Wall-hangings from Joined at the Hip.  Since August is coming up soon, I should get this made!  

I looked at the pattern and it said that I needed light greens. Hmm.  I don't have too many light greens, so   I looked in my scrap buckets of greens and didn't see anything.  I remembered that I had bought a log cabin watermelon kit years ago.   I like to add fabrics from my stash to kits that I buy, but this one didn't work well (at all!)  I tend to gravitate toward the olive greens when I'm buying fabric, and the greens in this kit  didn't play well together with my stash, so it sat on a shelf for years.  It had some light greens.  Yay!    

The pattern said I needed 6 light greens.  I held them up to my fabrics in my scrap bucket of greens, and I didn't see anything that would work.  I held them up to the greens in my fabric stash, and I found two fabrics that would work (woo hoo!). 

I probably could have used two of the light greens twice, but the more the merrier!  

My plan was to use the greens and reds that I used in my watermelon wallhanging.  However, when I added the darker greens to the light greens my stomach turned.  

  The darker greens were olive and the lighter greens have more blue in them.  So, I went back to the kit and pulled out the darker greens.  

Pretty!  And to think I was going to donate this kit to my Quilt Guild's sales table at our quilt show next year.  They look great with the light greens, and the reds that I used in my watermelon wall-hanging.  I needed 6 dark greens, but every time I added a dark green, they were all too olive.  

My favorite trick is to use my color wheel.  I will be honest when I say that I'm not able to determine if a color has too much yellow, red, or blue in them.  Some fabrics I can tell right away, but others not so much. Using the color wheel helps me "see".  I held it up to all of the greens in my scrap bucket of greens.    

I would have never chosen this piece had I not seen it for myself that it is in the same color family as the greens in the kit.  

I wouldn't have added this Thimbleberry print, either, 

but it looks perfect!  

I probably could have used the same greens more than once; it's a wall-hanging, afterall.  However, I like the challenge of trying to find things that will work.  It's the hunt, I guess, that's fun for me.  

I am happy to say that I have  finished all 80 of the bow-tie blocks that I have been sewing while sewing together the Quick and Easy Pinwheel that I showed you last week in this post.  .  Sewing every day with Pat Sloan in her Sew Every Day in July 2013 Challenge and sewing two (or more, in my case) quilts at the same time, as suggested by Bonnie Hunter in her Leaders and Enders book, has my sewing room with projects on each side of me to sew in between whatever project I am currently sewing.  

Have a great Sunday!  

Amanda