Transparency Quilts

What fun!  I have had an urge to do a transparency quilt for some time.  I have a book which has one in it, but I didn't really like the design and haven't ever focused on buying fabrics to work with it.  Since transparency requires great care in selecting appropriate fabrics, I had always planned to buy some specific to the project one day.  But I was surfing the other day and stumbled across a couple of transparencies that I loved, so I was inspired to hunt through my stash. I found more possibilities than I expected.  I knew I had bought a bunch of bright fat quarters a while back, and figured there were some good pairing in there.  So I dug them up, and confirmed that Yes, there were indeed some nice pairs that would work for this.

Then I needed to figure out a design. I would really like to design my own, but inspiration was not hitting me, and when I searched online, I kept coming across the same beautiful quilts.  All from one particular book, it seems.  So, I looked up the book, and lo and behold I could get it for my Kindle for only $10.00.

Now, a Kindle is not the best place to read a quilting book - especially one that is built around colour choice (seeing as the Kindle - at least the generation I have - is black and white).  But Amazon has their cloud reader, so I could read the book on my computer in full colour.  Perfect!  Ok, maybe not - reading on my monitor was a pain in the neck (literally) and I definitely need a larger monitor if I'm going to do that again.  But I managed to get through it.  Skimmed all the great notes on colour choice, and then jumped to the part I wanted - the quilts!

Well, it turns out that transparency quilts generally need 3-4 (or more) colours to create the illusion.  Not two.  So all my carefully picked pairs were a bit of a wash.  However, I went back into the stash, and found groupings of 3 fabrics in a few colour families that I think will work great with a nice cream background.

Now I'm on a mission to make a baby quilt from each of the designs in the book.  First step is to translate each design into EQ, so that I can resize it for the 24" quiltie that I need to make. This will make it much easier to make decisions.  Like, if a quilt block is 10.5" finished, do I make a quiltie from 4 blocks, or resize the block downwards and make more.  EQ designs are great for seeing the effect, and for not having to do all the math when it comes to cutting and setting blocks :)