I really enjoy doing the Bonnie Hunter Mystery quilts. She posted the colors on her blog
http://quiltville.blogspot.com/p/en-provence-mystery.html
I am looking forward to the mystery this year. It will be the first one I can work on since I am no longer working and I don't have little children under foot. Last year I used the same colors as Bonnie because I wanted to use up some red fabrics. This year I am changing the colors because I want to make a dent in my tub of blue fabrics.
I think I usually do well in selecting fabrics. Bonnie's intro suggests using Joan Wolfrom's 3 in 1 color tool. I read about it and decided to buy it. I think it is a good tool. I wanted to be careful because when I switched colors on the Celtic Solistice mystery. I did brown, purple, turquoise, and green. The purple and brown didn't have good contrast - as you can see in the border of the quilt at the top of my blog.
Where Bonnie is using purple and lavender, I am using blue and light blue. Where she is using green I am substituting orangeyellow. She has yellow and I yellowgreen. Finally for her constant she is using magenta and I am using purple.
Because there needs to be contrast between my orangeyellow and yellowgreen, I decided to make the orange yellow a constant. I thought of using a rusty orange but decided it wouldn't be a strong contrast with my greens. It is hard to discern in the picture, but the orangeyellow fabric is a pinstripe and I think it is going to pop against all the blues in the quilt. My constant is purple and it is a shot cotton and very pretty. I got 30% off for purchasing the rest of the bolt which was only an extra 1/2 yard.
My thinking is that in Bonnie's colors she seems to have two sets of contrasting colors (according to the Ive's color wheel) purple and yellow green also magenta and green. So I have chosen blue and orangeyellow and purple and yellowgreen. Bonnie's post shows pictures that were her inspiration and she will have used lots of different fabrics in each color but this is how I interpreted it when trying to chose mine.
I won a $25 gift card at a community sewing day put on by members of my guild in September. We worked on getting tops that were made quilted. I quilted 6 on my sewing machine and brought one home to do on the longarm. I picked these two fabrics as constants and purchased them with my gift card but then decided they wouldn't work well with the blues...I will use them is something else.
The other shopping I did was Quilter's Select Rulers and cutting mat. I'd been looking for a local shop that carried them and found it today when I was out and about so I decided I needed and early birthday gift.
Edit: I've decided to change the purples as this one will give more contrast from the blues.
