FIGURING OUT COLOR RELATIONSHIPS AGAIN!

You have probably heard the furniture/accessory adage that 'buy what you love; and it will all go together when you get it home'.  Does this also apply to color and fabric?  I have spent years trying to figure out the relationships between colors with some success, but with a whole lot of failures, too.  It just doesn't seem to come natural to me - it takes a lot of practice.

Strange, I know, but two of my favorite colors are brown and black.  Do they go together?  I decided to do a pillow experiment using scraps of wool that I had on hand.  I gradated brown and black, light and dark to see if they blended together.

For years, I used this technique when making quilts from scraps.  Below is one of my old work sheets from a quilt I made. I would pick out a couple of fabrics (shown upper left in photo below) to use repeatedly to unify the quilt; then I chose fabrics from my stash to add.  I would lay them out in gradation; then squint my eyes or photograph them to see if there was something that stood out in a bad way.  I'm sure in this particular quilt I eliminated bright yellows, and used the brighter red as an accent.

This is the quilt that resulted from that exercise.  It ended up having 96 different fabrics in it.

Even after many, many of these worksheets/quilts, I still struggle.

So now do I think black and brown go together?  Yes, but maybe it's because I just love the two colors.  (By the way, I'm terrible at picking out paint colors - I need more practice!)

Check out the following blogs for lots of inspiration:
No Minimalist Here for Thursday Open House
The Shabby Creek Cottage for Transformation Thursday
The Charm of Home for Home Sweet Home Friday
Romantic Home for Show and Tell Friday
Funky Junk Interiors for Saturday Nite Special
The Dedicated House for Make It Pretty Monday
Cozy Little House for Tweak It Tuesday
Primp for Primp Your Stuff Wednesday
Ivy and Elephants for What's It Wednesday