Working with Collections

My quilts are technically scrap quilts.   I use a variety of fabrics and colors in them.   I just grab whatever seems to belong in the particular quilt I am making.   Not a lot of planning goes into the choosing of a particular fabric.   Oh I might want a certain color or want to play with a fun fabric, but that is about as far as it goes.  I certainly don't pay attention to the particular designer or collection I am using.   In fact, I mix designers and collectors usually.

Recently I made 2 quilts that departed from the norm.   I decided I wanted to work with particular fabrics to see what happened.  

The first quilt I made is a baby quilt using the coordinated fabric from the same collection.   In this case, I used the same design in the fabric -- dragonflies -- in all the colors offered by the collection -- yellow, blue and purple.   Of course, the courthouse steps quilt use colors divided into even numbers (light and dark), you know 1 light, 1 dark, 2 dark, 2 light, etc.   3 does not work well.   But then I had the idea to use the yellow as the center and the border.   This was the result:

Here is a close up of the dragonfly design.

The next one used the same idea, except sometimes the designer uses other designs as part of the collection.   They are all part of the collection, but is a completely different design rather than just different colors of the same design.    For this one, I used Robert Kaufman's Stargazer collection.   The center piece of the planets, the sides are 4 of the cosmos designs.   There is actually a dark blue of this but I worried that the dark blue wouldn't contrast with the black and purple enough so I left it out it (plus that whole even numbered thing).   You will definitely want to snuggle up to the universe with this laptop quilt:

Here is a close up of the fabric for the steps:

I will do more collection quilts.   After all, it does make fabric choice really easy.