Electric Quilt Color Challenge

I love the Electric Quilt challenge for this month. Basically, you import a colorful photo that you love into EQ and use it as the color inspiration for a quilt. What a great way to come up with new color combinations for a quilt.

Here’s one of their examples:

Inspiration:

Quilt:

So I decided to try my hand at it. My inspiration photo was some Tuscan ceramics that I purchased in San Gimignano, Italy. I took this photo just before the store packed up my purchases to ship to me in Utah. I identified the 9 main colors / values from the photo that I wanted to use in a quilt.

And here’s my first pass at a quilt using the colors. I don’t know whether I’ll eventually tweak this and send it to Electric Quilt for their challenge. I just know that I wanted to design a quilt that at first glance looked a lot harder to make than it actually was. So, here’s the first image WITHOUT lines outlining the blocks and patches.

And here’s the one with the outlines. It wouldn’t be hard to piece – but the end result would look very complicated!

I’m considering modifying the orange and rust pieces such that they would be pieced and have value gradations from light to dark / dark to light (or vice versa) to simulate a Tuscan sunset. Who knows?

Regardless, I love the technique of using a photo as inspiration for the color palette of a quilt. It certainly would keep me from getting into a color rut!