Blending in Value + Color

How nice to be at work again on a quilt with value and color blends. I often sew the Honeycomb Stars quilt with darker value fabrics at the center of the quilt and lighter value fabrics at the left and right edges. My boyfriend really likes that effect, which reminds him of light on water. As a wall quilt, these details will be seen and felt.

I began laying out the quilt on my design wall, working from the center of the quilt with the darkest colors. Here I am auditioning add-in fabrics, because I wanted more variety. I did not end up using the blue/white plaid print because the high contrast between the blue and white elements would draw more attention to that fabric than desired. The other two additions made the cut.

Before I arrange my hexagons on the design wall, I sew on the triangle bits so that the background fabric can play its roll. This pattern is entirely machine sewn without any tricky y-seams!

Here are my background colors from left: Kona Cornflower, Freespirit Cadet, Kona Cadet, Tilda Night Blue, Kona Windsor.

The background triangles can be chain-pieced to the hexagons for fast, efficient sewing. Elora likes to help me snip them apart to separate each patchwork piece.

Time to chain-piece the low value hexagons!

Here is what I have so far. The burgundy fabrics look more red than they are in real life, but otherwise this is pretty accurate.

I considered using the more muted colors from the wallpaper in this quilt, which could include all the various forms of green there. But I decided not to go in that direction, since our main living room colors are stormy blues, plummy purples, mauve and burgundy. I have included touches of soft sage green in this quilt for now, but it may get weeded out. The wallpaper belongs to the adjacent dining room, where green does play a roll. When I imagine this wall quilt on the dark blue walls of our living room, I keep preferring a more limited palette.

This is my third Honeycomb Stars quilt! For the first time I am making some negative space stars by using hexagons similar to the background triangles in color and/or value. Maybe you can spot one such emphasized star in the image above? For this star all of the star points are a matching darkest blue color. I like how that subtly draws the eye without taking over the quilt.

Now I must wait a bit for some fabrics that are coming in the mail. I hope to include them in the mid-tone hexagons for variety. Fingers crossed!