I recently discovered the coolest free online color tool at colorschemedesigner.com. The possibilities of quilters using this tool are limitless! Here are a few things I have learned.

1. Under “About & Help” in the top right corner, turn on “show tooltips” so that when you hover your cursor over anything on the page, a box pops up to tell you how it works.

2. Near the top left, under “Color Scheme Designer” are six circles that look like clock faces. Each circle represents a type of color scheme. Hover over a circle for a definition of that scheme. Click on it to give that color scheme a whirl. Then click on different places in the bigger colored circle to see some of the possibilities. ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET???

3. At the bottom left are three tabs. “Hues” gives you the colored circle. But click on “Adjust Scheme” and you can tone down or liven up the hues by moving the little circle around on the grid.

From there you can explore on your own. A word of caution: you can spend hours playing with this and thinking of the quilt possibilities! Here’s the best part: if you’re not technically savvy, you can still use this tool in amazing ways. And if you do happen to know a lot about computers, you can do even more.

I have a few tools I turn to again and again on the topic of color.

Often-used color tools

One is the 3-in-1 Color Tool by Joen Wolfrom for C&T. I use this tool constantly. I also use a color wheel called the Rainbow Color Selector and a book called ColorWorks, The Crafter’s Guide to Color by Deb Menz. It’s a good idea to consider making use of these tools to plan the colors in your quilts.

Now I’m off to pull fabrics based on a color scheme I created in Color Scheme Designer! With any luck, I’ll show them to you in a post to come soon.

Even the quilt’s name—Fandango—makes you want to dance! Fandango is featured in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Quiltmaker, which should be arriving any day now. It was designed and made by Karen Griska, an interesting person who has made more than 200 quilts, all original designs. And the quilts are ever-so-interesting! They invite you in for a closer look. The ones we’ve had here in the office intrigue me day after day after day!

Karen has a great blog chock-full of ideas at selvageblog.blogspot.com. You’ll want to read our interview with Karen, too. I’ll be interested in hearing about your experience making the first few fan blocks (instructions are in the Fandango pattern). My first successful block looked like this:

I haven’t gotten back to this project yet, but I will. These little charmers are addictive.

Our Jan/Feb ’10 issue (No. 131) features a gorgeous quilt in QM Spotlight (on the last page) with an interesting story sent by Kathy O’Toole.

Cabin Constellation

It was made from a pattern called Cabin Constellation which first appeared in the May/June ‘05 issue (No. 103).

Peggy Stern from Baxter, Minnesota and Kathy O’Toole from Oakland, California are sisters who made the quilt together, in spite of living more than 1500 miles apart. It’s one of many projects they have worked on together through a system of long-distance quilting they have developed over the past 12 years.

Along with a cousin, Marilyn Petersen from Watertown, South Dakota, they sometimes have several projects going at once.

It takes the three women about three years to finish a quilt together. So far they have made about nine quilts and given away three as wedding gifts to young couples in their shared families.

Granddaughter Latice and her new husband

Cabin Constellation became a wedding gift for Kathy’s granddaughter Latice and her new husband.

Both sisters had been saying they wanted to use up some of their scraps. When Peggy saw this pattern in Quiltmaker, she thought it would be more fun than most patterns because it had more than one type of block. She suggested to her sister that they make the quilt. Kathy had already seen Cabin Constellation in Quiltmaker and liked it too.

Kathy picked the colors by looking through many books and narrowing the color scheme to a combination that appeared mostly in antique quilts from the mid- to late-1800s. Both sisters pulled fabrics from their stashes, which differ considerably.

They exchanged enough fabrics so that each had some from both stashes. They made extra blocks so that in the end, some could be eliminated if necessary.

Kathy says their tastes in fabrics and designs are very different but they each admire what the other can do. “It’s nice to bring two totally different sets of eyes to the same project and to use each other’s fabrics. Most importantly, the joint project gave us some alone time during visits when we were surrounded by other family members. These sessions together alone bring back the good old days of playing paper dolls when we were kids.”

The women as children in South Dakota

The women grew up on a farm near Watertown, South Dakota. Along with Marilyn, they belonged to a girls club organized by their mothers, through which they learned to sew, embroider and bake cakes and cookies. Like many others, they discovered quilting when America celebrated her Bicentennial in 1976.

A September wedding in Wisconsin

Peggy’s son Tad was married in September and Marilyn’s son Bruce will be married in January. Each couple will choose a quilt when the family gathers next for the holidays. By that time, another cousin who is Marilyn’s sister, Liz from Dallas, will have been added to the circle. The women are learning to chat online and to hold conference calls for virtual quilt meetings.

“This is about more than quilting. We are trying to keep a family together in an era where we are geographically scattered. I love my local five-member quilt group in the San Francisco Bay area, but I value even more the time with this virtual family group that dates back to childhood,” says Kathy.

What’s your long-distance quilting story? Have you made a quilt for a special occasion? We always love hearing in the comments what our readers are doing.

Cabin Constellation will be available for purchase as a downloadable pdf in the near future. We’ll announce its debut here.

Ever since Executive Editor June Dudley mentioned Jan Morin in her last edit letter, readers have been asking us for more information. Seems like a perfect topic for a blog post. Jan lives in Pine Grove, California and has found a way to be green with her quilting scraps and contribute to a worthwhile cause at the same time.

Jan makes pet pillows and donates them to her local SPCA. Here’s how:

Using stash fabric, cut two squares or rectangles of the same size. They can be any size that is roughly appropriate for a pet to lounge on. Place the pieces right sides together and sew around the edges, leaving an opening on one side for turning. Turn the pillow right sides out.

Use your fabric scraps and thread clippings to stuff the pillow.

Jan says the scraps don’t have to be extremely small, just not extremely large. After stuffing, sew the opening closed.

Jan says the pillows are used for dogs and cats, who love them! The SPCA loves them, too, and even gives them to new pet owners for their newly adopted pets.

To find an animal shelter in your area, visit aspca.org. If you’ve read this far, please leave a comment about something you’ve sewn for a good cause and we’ll have a giveaway! The winner is Prairie Quilter, comment #18 and she has been notified. Congratulations!

This beautiful bundle holds nine fat quarters of brand new Benartex fabrics in a line called Playful Pups. It’s so new, stores don’t have it yet. We’ll draw for a winner on Friday, Oct. 30 about noon MST.

Another view of the fabrics included:

How cute are these?! Our thanks to Jan for sharing her good cause with QM readers.

When we had our Fabricadabra workshop a while back, I tried marbling fabric with shaving cream. I had gotten a kit with all the supplies from Quilters Treasure.

It was a fun process, even if it was somewhat messy. I guess if you don’t want a mess, you shouldn’t be trying to create your own fabric! The first step is to spread shaving cream evenly over the work surface. I didn’t stress about getting it perfect.

The Tsukineko inks are applied next. They come in lots of colors. You can use one color or more. I dropped ink (pink, blue and yellow) onto the shaving cream with a toothpick.

Now you get to make the designs which will eventually end up on the fabric and look pretty and swirly. You can drag a comb through the shaving cream/paint, or you can use your fingers, a toothpick or whatever you have on hand.

Here’s another version using different ink colors:

It’s getting interesting. Take the fabric you want to marble and lay it carefully right side down on top of the shaving cream/paint–kind of pressing the fabric into the shaving cream. Pick up the fabric, lay it flat with the painted side up and use a squeegee to remove the shaving cream.

The fabric I used was plain white cotton. I wasn’t crazy about the way the white showed, so I decided to add some paint.

This might not have been the best idea, but I figured I didn’t really have anything to lose. Later I decided to use Jacquard paints and paint the whole thing pink, which got rid of the white background I was disliking so much.

Here is my finished fabric. The nice thing is that if you don’t like what’s happening, you can paint over it! The kit from Quilters Treasure was helpful—it saved me from running all over town to gather supplies.

I decided to cut up the fabric and do a couple of mock-ups, just to see how it would behave in a block.

Here it is with a deep blue Tonga batik from Timeless Treasures:

And another with Nana’s Garden from Red Rooster Fabrics:

And finally with luscious Ricky Tims’s Rhapsody Colorée III, also from Red Rooster:

I’ll be doing more marbling. It’s easy and fun!

We had a brainstorming meeting a while ago at work, and I started thinking about the concept of brainstorming and how I might apply it to ideas for artwork or quilts or quilted artwork. June guided the meeting and told us up front that no idea was off-limits; we should try not to respond positively or negatively to any idea; we should use ideas and comments to “jump off” into new ideas. In 30 minutes, we came up with more than 300 ideas. It was inspiring!

So I need to begin something new and creative in my work/sewing space at home, and I decided to brainstorm to get myself going. I’ve decided on a theme of “daughter.”

My daughter Holly and me

Here is the beginning of my brainstorm list:

DAUGHTER

sweet, precious, Holly, Elizabeth, fun, memories, May, writer, social concern, gift, love, Seattle, rainboots, funky, creative, cell phone, texting, Side-by-Side job, blogger, Holly Wood, loves Amy Butler and Anna Maria Horner. My own mom, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, late-in-life-baby, helpmate, going for repairs, delivering livestock, lunch to the field, Venus as birthplace, saddle shoes, Fostoria American.

The list probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it has all kinds of emotions and associations for me, and I can see where it will be good fodder for a quilt design or a piece of artwork. Try it yourself–choose a theme and get started! We would welcome your musings as comments here on Quilty Pleasures. Let the brainstorming begin!