Yellow Revision: In Which Kona Canary is Fired, and Kona Grellow is Tapped for Replacement

I had high hopes of knocking out a few of the easier blocks for Anders' Beware the Ishmaelites sampler quilt over the weekend, but I was stymied by a color glitch.  My plan was to make all four of the predominantly yellow blocks, and I printed up my foundation paper piecing templates and my rotary cutting charts and headed upstairs to the studio...  But when I pulled out the two yellow shades of Kona Solid fabric that I'd used in my EQ8 design, I had serious misgivings about using them together in my quilt.  I decided to trust my software and just go with it, so I cut out the first block:

Um, NO, that's not going to work for me!  The fabrics you see above are Kona Solids in Canary (the brighter, more primary yellow in the corners), Kona Sunflower (the more muted honey mustard yellow), and Kona Snow.  These are the same fabrics I colored my block with in EQ8, but as you see below, in the software rendering they appear to be darker and lighter tints of the same shade of yellow:

It's just as well, really, because that super-bright, primary yellow Canary fabric leans a little juvenile, and this quilt is for a nearly-17-year-old young man.  

So I got out my Kona color chart and selected a different shade of yellow to replace Canary every place that it's used in the quilt, which includes in the borders.  Instead of Canary, I'll be pairing my Sunflower yellow with Kona Solid Grellow:

So, funny story.  After determining via my Kona Solids swatch chart that Grellow was the right shade for this quilt, I googled "Kona Solid Grellow" in hopes of finding an online shop that stocked the fabric.  To my surprise, my own blog came up in my search results, because I'd used that exact shade in Lars's Mission Impossible graduation quilt last Spring.  I had totally forgotten that!  Of course I had to raid my stash in hopes of finding leftover yardage, but the best I could come up with was a few leftover triangle scraps.  Laying that scrap of Grellow onto the pieces I cut out for this block, I am even more confident that swapping out the bright Canary yellow for the darker and more saturated Grellow will be worth the wait.

Here's what the whole quilt looked like before, with Canary and Sunflower for the two yellow shades:

And here's what the quilt looks like with Sunflower remaining the same, but all the Canary fabric swapped out for Grellow (including in the borders):

(Looking at this rendering with the black lines indicating seam lines, I've resolved to go back in and redraft some of those blocks that have flying geese units in place of diamonds and Y-seams.  As a reminder/disclaimer, my Beware the Ishmaelites is basically the Moda Modern Building Blocks sampler quilt from 2014, with added borders, resizing, recoloring, and several of the original blocks swapped out for different ones).

I'm glad I ordered a different yellow, but wish I'd made this decision earlier in the day.  Although I already had all of the block fabrics on hand for this quilt, I only ordered the border fabrics yesterday morning.  So I ordered an additional 3 1/4 yds of Canary that I will not be using in this quilt at all, and then about four hours later, placed an additional order for the Grellow (without getting my coupon discount).  And now I have to wait to start these blocks until the new fabric shows up in the mail and gets washed and ironed.  Grrr...  Oh, well -- it's just as well, because there is still plenty of quilting to be done on Spirit Song while I wait for my Grellow to arrive.  

Anyway, here are the blocks I'm planning to make next for Beware the Ishmaelites:

I thought they would give me a nice break from the endless hours of custom quilting on Spirit Song, and as they are far less complicated blocks than the last one I pieced for this project, I was hoping the four yellow blocks would give me some lost momentum that I need to get that going again.  I'm planning to piece the first of these blocks just with rotary cutting and traditional piecing, because the math works out nicely for that one.  For the other three, I'll be foundation paper piecing since my block sizes don't translate into ruler-friendly measurements.  So, even though I'm slightly annoyed that my two shades of yellow fabric look so different together in real life than they did in my design software, I am still indebted to my software for freeing me to easily make blocks in whatever weird size I want with printable foundation paper piecing patterns.

Even though I'm going to be foundation paper piecing this block, I still want to precut my fabric patches with as little waste as possible.  So I print a rotary cutting chart along with my foundation paper piecing patterns, but I change two settings before hitting the print button.  Instead of the Seam Allowance Width of 0.250 that I would want for traditional piecing with a 1/4" seam allowance, I increase my Seam Allowance Width to 0.375 for a 3/8" seam allowance.  I also select Rounding to the nearest 1/8".  That gives me a little bit of a fudge factor in positioning the patches for foundation paper piecing without an excessive amount of waste when I trim the seam allowances later.

Well, at least I have my rotary cutting charts and foundation paper piecing patterns all printed up and ready to go when that fabric arrives, right?  Meanwhile, back to my quilting!  My one and only To-Do this Tuesday is to finish ALL of the quilting on my Spirit Song quilt.  Wish me luck!

I'm linking up today's post with:

TUESDAY

·       Colour and Inspiration Tuesday at Clever Chameleon

·       To-Do Tuesday at Home Sewn By Us

WEDNESDAY

·       Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

·       Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter