Marion's Miscellaneous Musings

I have my favorite colors. They are, in order, blue, turquoise, sky blue, robin's egg blue, grayed blue, teal, navy blue, royal blue, baby blue, periwinkle, any other blues I forgot, white, green, pink, purple, gray, brown, black, some reds, yellow, and finally all the orange reds and orange. This is an improvement. Once the list stopped at green. More recently the list stopped just before black. It is only since I have been quilting that I have accepted that any other color has a right to exist, particularly orange.

Orange is an obnoxious color. It demands to be in a quilt, and refuses to leave. (The fact that it is right is highly annoying.) Yellow at least asks politely and goes away (without whining) when you say no. Which is probably why there is so much of it in the quilt above. It is acting like an adult. Orange acts like an obnoxious teenager.

The second quilt was originally an autumn leaves quilt. This would have required me to actually use orange. So I changed the leaves to flowers and happily used blue and green, and a little purple. I tried to make the borders out of blue, but none of them would cooperate. But, since blues are my favorite color, I forgive them. But green and purple cooperated, and I did bind it with blue.

Thanks to my niece orange is actually on the list. She requested a blue and orange baby quilt. I groaned, partly because blue and orange are colors that You Are Not Supposed To Put Together, and partly because I dislike orange. But I found this cool pattern of rectangles and stars, and it turned out really neat. In fact, one of the oranges I liked so much that I went out and bought a yard of it, thinking that I now have my lifetime supply of orange. A year later I went back and bought the last of the bolt, about 2 yards (and now on sale). That is almost gone... I now have quite a collection of orange, including peaches and apricots and such. And all my yellows are currently on the ironing board, being incorporated into a baby quilt. (Time to go shopping!)

I also discovered that if you want to mix blues that don't like each other, like royal blue and periwinkle and baby blue and navy, if you sash it in orange they start behaving.

Since I started quilting, I don't look so much at whether I like the color as I look at how they go together, so I can appreciate the autumn colors. I don't, after all, have to wear them! But blues are still more fun to sew with. Particularly turquoise. And sky blue. And navy. And periwinkle. And ...

Nadia: If you don't like that picture, I can put a new one in with your head chopped off.