Bloom Bloom Pow Quilt: Planning your design

Welcome to the first post of the Bloom Bloom Pow Quilt-Along! I'm so excited to get started! (More information about this quilt-along can be found in the Introductory post.)

One of my favorite things about quilt-alongs is not that you don't just learn how to cut up your fabric and piece it back together again—you can also learn about design. And design, of course, really happens in the planning stages. So that's what we're going to discuss today—how to plan our your quilt and combine fabrics to make the most of this particular design. Really fun stuff for design nerds like me. : )

(I know many of you purchased a Bloom Bloom Pow fabric bundle, which means you have exactly the same fabric as me. If you're planning to mimic my quilt and color placement, this design-planning post probably isn't crucial for you. But if you want to make any changes to my design, such as the colors used, prints used, or color placement within the quilt, this post will give you a framework for doing just that!)

Probably the single most important element to think about in this quilt is value. (Just in case you don't know, value refers to how light or dark a fabric is.) In this quilt, value makes the "flower petals" (the spoke-like things) pop out at the viewer, while the shaded background recedes and gives the flowers a bit of depth. So, regardless of whether you're using Pearl Bracelets or any other line of fabric, it's crucial that you get a handle on the value of the fabrics you're using.

Let's start by looking at this lovely photo of my Bloom Bloom Pow quilt bundle, made up of Pearl Bracelet prints by Lizzie House.

I think it makes sense to group the fabric as follows: Dark, Medium, or Light. With the subtler print of the Pearl Bracelets line, I think it's fairly clear which Pearl Bracelet colors fall into which value categories. But a trick I often use to make value easier to spot is to look at a black-and-white picture of fabric or a quilt layout. So here's the same photo of the Bloom Bloom Pow bundle in black and white. The dark and light values are much more obvious now, aren't they?

From there I separated the Pearl Bracelet prints into the following groups:

Dark colors:
Cosmonaut, Grape Jelly, Persimmon, Watermelon, Swiss Chard, Meyer Lemon, Basil (7 prints).

Medium colors:
Verbena, Frosting, Juniper, Lilac, Pond (5 prints).

Light colors:
Citron, Glacier, Ice Skate, Peach, Cotton Candy (5 prints).

Obviously, value is all a matter of degree. I was on the fence about some of these—Meyer Lemon and Basil could easily have been in the "Medium" category, while Verbena and Frosting could possibly have been "Dark." Just because I separated mine this way doesn't mean you have to, so if you're using Pearl Bracelets but would like to make some changes to your value stacks, I say go for it. : ) And you don't need to have the same number of prints in each of your groups that I do (7/5/5), although I don't recommend straying too far from that ratio.

Once you have your fabrics sorted by value, we'll be using those groups to decide which colors go where in the quilt design. The "darks" will always be flower petals/spokes in the Bloom Bloom Pow design, and "lights" will always be the shaded background in the block. "Mediums" can be used in either spot. Some flower petals/spokes will be medium, and some shaded backgrounds will be medium, depending on what they are paired with.

So the next step is to think about fabric pairings. Each hexagon-shaped flower block is made up of six triangles. Each block has one color for the flower petals (Persimmon in the example above), one color for the shaded background (Peach in the example above), and white. The important thing here is that your flower petals are darker than the shaded background. So, dark flower petals can be combined with a medium or light shaded background, while medium flower petals can be combined only with a light shaded background.

My advice is to try out pairings from your selected fabrics/value groups and see what looks good together. Let's take Watermelon, for example.

Watermelon looks great paired with Peach ...

... or with Cotton Candy.

And as you can see, Cotton Candy looks great with a lot of things—Frosting, Lilac, and Watermelon.

But even when choosing from the correct value groupings, not all pairings may work. For example, Watermelon (dark) paired with Frosting (medium). It sounds yummy enough, but I didn't think there was enough contrast in that pairing for it to work. (That's probably because Frosting was one of those borderline colors that could have been either Dark or Medium.)

So that's it for this week! Check out the fabric you're planning to use for this quilt, separate it into value stacks, and decide which color pairings do and do not work. Once you do that, you'll be ready to cut your fabric next week!

Quilt-Along Schedule

March 21 - Introduction and fabric requirements
March 28 - Design strategy (we'll just be talking about the big picture here, so you won't need your fabric yet for this post)
April 4 - Cutting your fabric
April 11 - Strip-piecing instructions
April 18 - Cutting the triangles and deciding on a layout
April 25 - Piecing the triangles to complete the top
May 2 - Quilting and finishing