Welcome to the New Year! I’m so glad to be back to Color Play Friday after a couple of weeks off.

2015 has come to a close, and everyone is making fun plans for 2016! This year, there’s a few things I’ve love to see from our weekly Color Play. First, I want to start occasionally making projects inspired by the palettes that I’ve created. I’ve discovered some amazing color combinations through Color Play Friday and I would love to turn them into actual quilts! Second, I would love to have some more people joining us! One of the best parts of Color Play Friday has been seeing Trina and Steph’s bundles- looking at the similarities and (usually) differences between what we each come up with. That’s where you come in!

   We’d love for you to get in on the fun and create your own Color Play post! You can create a bundle of fabric, select yarns or embroidery threads, or create a project inspired by our photo. Be sure to let Trina or I know so we can link up to you. You can get in contact with me via email, or by tagging me on Instagram

More about Color Play Friday:

Trina from In An Otter Life and I created Color Play Friday one day after a nice trip to the fabric store together.

 Here are the rules:

1. Each week, Trina or I will select a picture from our joint Pinterest board. These are all pictures that one of us has taken on our adventures.
2. We each create a palette using colors from that picture
3. We then create a bundle of 5-8 fabrics that is inspired by that palette. They don’t have to be an exact match to our palette, and we can throw in contrasting or accent colors, but the bundle should look inspired by the palette.
4. We don’t see anyone else’s palette or bundle before we post on Friday.
5. That’s it! It’s going to be so fun to see what we each come up with.

This week photo is one of Trina’s titled First Snow in Arlington. I know it was taken last year, because Arlington has not had any snow like that so far this winter! All we’ve gotten is some slushy stuff that didn’t stick around to be played in.

I picked this photo, because I’m hoping for pretty, fluffy snow in this New Year!

Besides a little bit of grey in the tree trunk, the blue light in this photo pretty much gave me a monochromatic palette to work from. So, I knew that if I couldn’t create contrast using hue, I would have to do it using value (how light or dark a color is). My resulting palette is a an array of greyish blue ranging from almost black to almost white with a neutral grey thrown in for good measure.

Here are the fabrics I chose:

Sarah Watson, Garden Secrets, Bauble in Gray

Carolyn Friedlander, Architextures, Crosshatch in Blue

Joel Dewberry, Atrium, Eclipse in Slate

Hawthorne Fabrics, Triangle Mosaic in Sky

Ink and Spindle, Landscape, Chalk in Gray

Rashida Coleman-Hale, Bluebird, Bow Ties

When doing my bundle, I had some fun blue fabrics with chartreuse, mustard or orange that would have made a good contrast, but none of them seemed quite right so I decided to keep it a monochromatic bundle. If this was a quilting project, I would use one of these fabrics as a backing.

Clockwise from top left:

Hawthorne Threads, Forest Fables, Folk Tails in Indigo

Ink and Spindle, Landscape, Little Forest in Gray

Pat Bravo, Artisan, Intertwill Fervence

Sarah Watson,  Luxe in Bloom, Boucherouite in Silver

A note about scale:

• While I believe scale is a very important part of fabric selection, the fabrics shown in my Color Play images are not always perfectly to scale. I do my best, by you should always double check scale before ordering!

Don’t forget to head over to In an Otter Life to see what Trina came up with and to Shimmy and More to see Steph’s bundle!

You can also head over to my Color Play Friday page to see my palettes and bundles from previous weeks.

I hope you can join us next week!

Happy Sewing, ~L