Mellow Yellow....Project Quilting Week 4

Mellow Yellow is the theme for this weeks challenge. Of course once again I was stumped, how was I going to be inspired by yellow? I didn't even think I had any yellow fabric in my stash & my goal is to use up my stash & not purchase more fabric. This week was going to be hard.

I recently read the book All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, and when the Mellow Yellow Challenge came out, I thought about colors and light and how we actually see colors.

Did you know that the human eye can see 7,000,000 colors?  The way our eyes see colors will affect our eyes differently, some colors can be irritants, cause headaches, some can be soothing.

Yellow is often associated with warmth, happiness, fun, caution and electricity. In many countries is considered a sacred color, the color of gods and deities.

Yellow is a primary color along with red and blue. Without going into great detail because I'm writing a quilting challenge post not a scientific journal, in the world of color mixing...to get the color yellow you use red and green...if you want to know more about how that works...google it. :)

But did you know that yellow is also the most fatiguing color and an eye irritant? Because more light is reflected by bright colors, it results in excessive stimulation of the eyes. Yellow is also the color that the human eye notices first. Our eyes see yellow because the color yellow is reflected off the surface of an object, while the other colors are absorbed into the object.  Look around you and see what things jump out at you in a room, you will be surprised that it is the yellow objects that you will notice first!
Of course once I started looking for YELLOW inspiration, it was everywhere!

I found a neat poem by Carl Sandburg about Yellow and thought maybe that could be the inspiration for a fun quilt...but with a raging snow storm outside it was really hard to get enthusiastic about pumpkins in the fall.

Theme in Yellow 

by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields 

 Orange and tawny gold clusters 

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling. 

I still wasn't sure I had very much yellow fabric in my stash since yellow is not typically a color I would purchase unless I specifically needed it for something. I decided I would dye some fabric and maybe find a way to use that in my project, so I dyed a couple of pieces of cotton, one with some different silk dye yellows and the other one with turmeric. I didn't like the way the silk dyes turned out after they were steamed,  but I was in love with the deep gold color that was created by the turmeric.  The silk dyes are on the left and the turmeric is on the right.

Since each of these squares of fabric were only about 9 x 9, and I had already decided I wasn't going  to use one of them,  I realized that I was going to have to dig into the stash and get serious about finding some yellow fabrics! I was surprised that I had as many different yellows as I did. But what to do with them all? I thought about making something with a golden elephant or Buddha on it and then creating a pillow of some sort. But the Olympics are on this week and I just want to sit in front of the fire and watch snowboarding, skiing & ice skating until I fall asleep in the warmth!

I was working on a customer quilt next door during the day and my nights were consumed by gold medal dreams!

On Wednesday we had Kat Perkins (Semi Finalist from Season 6 of the Voice) speak to the students at school about her journey, about Kindness, being Fearless, Brave and following your dreams...this would have been great inspiration for the last challenge! :) She is amazing & if you ever have a chance to hear her speak or sing, you will not be disappointed! I went home feeling inspired and thinking about the lyrics to her song Fearless..."What would you do if you weren't afraid? What crazy chances would you take?...What if you lived your life out loud? Not in the silence of your doubt....

When I got home from work that evening I decided that I wasn't going to win any gold medals sitting in front of the TV, my fabric wasn't going to sew itself together, and time was running out for doing anything overly fantastic. I needed to be fearless, stop doubting myself, and get busy!

Sometimes I find it very therapeutic to just cut fabric up with no rhyme or reason, then sew it back together, chop it up again, then repeat. So that is what I did with all the yellow fabric I had found, I cut a few strips of each yellow and went to town! I cut the turmeric fabric into a 2 inch strip because I wanted that beautiful gold to stand out from the rest.
This is what I had when I finally decided that I had chopped & sewn enough for the night!

I took it next door that next morning & put it on the quilting machine, I then just quilted random wavy patterns, lines and checkerboard designs on it. I thought it was quite fitting that while I was quilting it, Emmy Lou Harris was singing "Gold" on the CD player...."No matter how bright I glittered, baby, I could never be gold."

After I had it quilted I added some fun green thread designs with my sewing machine. Now what? I still didn't have an idea and thought it really wasn't something I wanted to put binding on and call a wall hanging. I finally decided that I would fold it in half and make a bag, of course this required adding a zipper and a liner. I found an old golden orange zipper and a fun green fabric to use as a lining. The zipper was tricky because it was 8 inches longer than the bag and I had to cut it down to size, plus I had cut off my selvage edges when I was done quilting it so I had to figure out how to attach it to the quilted fabric without it getting too bulky. There is the right way to do things, and then there is my way. My way works but it isn't always the most accurate. I was surprised that the zipper actually closed when I finally had it attached!

Close up of the green stitching.













The other side of the bag.










                                     



The green lining fabric.



The finished bag with a tassel I made for the zipper pull.


It was fun making something different this week! It will be even more fun when I learn how to move photos and text around in this blog! 😂 I am quilting from Western South Dakota where this last week it was again -0 with a couple of days of new snow. We are ready for warmer days and the warmth of the sun!