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Splendid colour tips for quilting: Greys in quilts

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Grey is one of the most – if not the most – versatile neutral colours in quilting. It is a softer colour than black, and it will help your highlight colours stand out. In this post, I share practical tips about the use of grey in quilting using my own quilts and quilted items as examples. Grey represents neutrality, simplicity, peace, future-orientedness and logic. Grey is not an emotional colour, and it is associated with technology, industrial activity, control, professionalism and even with elegance. Not all greys are colourless – a pure mix of black and white. There are all shades, ranging from yellowish to purplish and brownish: And then there is the special brown-grey colour called taupe. Taupe is the colour that is just as brown as it is grey. The word “taupe” comes from the French word for mole whose fur is of that colour. It may be that quilters find taupe more interesting than other people because Japanese quilters use it abundantly and in very chic ways. They are maste...
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Curious quilt: a modern, twin-size quilt finish

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Welcome to my second quilt finish of the year! Today I’m sharing my brand new Curious quilt (Utelias in Finnish). It is a twin-size quilt sewn of two different blocks, and a project that I started in September 2025. I finished the quilt top in Febrary and shared the full start-to-finish piecing process earlier in my blog post about the 16-patch- and X-blocks in a quilt surface. In this post you’ll get: Proof that quilting makes the surface come to life Many pictures of this quilt Summary of quilt details for this Curious quilt.  It felt great to photograph this one on a sunny afternoon. My lovely husband is a seasoned quilt-holder and most of the images from the photo shoot came out great. This is the first test block – or block-and-a-half – that I made in September 2025. Can you spot the test block on the finished surface? Here’s a picture that I was going to use in the February post but did not: We had quite a bit of snow in January-February time this year, and su...
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Finishing a scrappy quilt top quickly (Quilt studio diary)

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In my previous studio diary post, my scrappy quilt top was starting very slowly. Then it happened: after the first, slowest-to-make blocks were done, the rest of the quilt came together in just a few days. The four-patches in squares were particularly fast to sew. I’ve noticed that after the first 25 blocks, the process usually becomes much smoother. There are fewer mistakes in cutting and trimming, for example. This is very noticeable in my way of working – I cut pieces for a few blocks at a time, not everything at once. With all the blocks done, the only thing left was to design them into an orderly layout and sew them into a quilt top. This time it was not easy to identify dark, mid-value and light blocks because almost all of them were mid-value. They also had the white corners in common (except for the bunny block). Well, I ended up identifying the very darkest ones and the lightest ones and decided to organise the rest by colour somehow. I did think carefully about the ...
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Starting a scrappy quilt slowly (Quilt studio diary)

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This Quilt studio diary post is about something that I’ve learned to appreciate: starting a quilting project slowly. Especially when I’m developing my own measurements for a quilt that I’ve seen in a picture, a thoughtful beginning can help me later on. Ever since I started to make quilts, I’ve drawn inspiration from the beautiful works of other people. I’ve always liked to look at a picture and then figure out the block or blocks that are needed, measurements and all. I’ve only ever bought a handful of patterns – probably fewer than I’ve created myself. My latest project has been inspired by Charisma Horton’s quilt “Positive Vibes”. Rather than using her pattern itself, I explored the design on my own and figured out measurements that looked good to me. Designing my own version I liked what I saw as a combination of X blocks and four-patch-in-a-square blocks. Because I’ve had experience in creating an X block, I wanted to figure out my own pattern and measurements. These were...
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Splendid colour tips for quilting: Yellow in quilts

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My quilts do not feature a lot of yellow, but I often take advantage of its eye-catching character. Today’s colour tips for quilting center around yellow: what to watch out for and how to use yellow successfully in your quilts. Yellow is often associated with youth, hope, and joy. It is an optimistic, energetic colour and it is often used to draw attention to something. What to watch out for when using yellow? Many quilters consider yellow a difficult colour, and this is probably because yellow is such an intensive colour for the human eye. And at the same time, even the most saturated yellows look surprisingly close to white in value to the human eye. As a result, any yellows tend to blend into the white areas placed next to them, so it is difficult to achieve a good value contrast between yellow and white. Even so, yellow is not automatically the lightest-value fabric in the surface. For a long time, I did not understand this and thought that any yellow would be a “light”...
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