Sticky Taffy

As someone relatively new to quilting, I will say that one of the most intimidating things, especially when you are doing this via the internet, is picking and coordinating fabric.

Obviously it's easy when you get a stack of fabrics from a collection, and they all match so well and look so amazing that it's easy to go that route, and easier still when you have a pattern and use the fabrics that the designer used.

I have a bad tendency of doubting my choices and instincts. I will chalk quite a bit of this up to the fact that I'm new at this, and also that I'm often trying to make these choices whilst behind a keyboard, and not having direct access to the fabric. Sometimes it's hard to get a good grasp on how the scale of one print works with another, and whether shades that look alike actually match.

My Halloween Taffy quilt was giving me such issues, although I have already hit "SEND" on the order form that will bring me a bunch of Ghastlies fabrics for this piece. Initially I had thought to use the main Ghastlies print (with the figures outside) with a grey backing, but subsequently wondered if it might get too dark with other prints I was auditioning for the other quilt components, and then seeing pictures of the fabrics on blogs and Flickr kept making me change my mind because you keep seeing the fabrics differently.

As a result of seeing different images, and based on the interactions of various colors on a picture over on Hawthorne Threads' blog (mostly the second stack picture was what did it), I'm now going with a white based focal fabric and star points, with a very dark grey/almost black for the star backgrounds, and grey-based prints for the block corners and edges. While the mauve would be a good coordinate, I didn't want it to lean too much to the feminine side, and I wanted to keep it more monochromatic. I may yet change my mind when the fabrics arrive, if I'm not entirely happy with the selection. Argh!

I have been very happy that this collection doesn't rely on the staple Halloween color of orange. I like orange just fine, but I sometimes find it very limiting. And I also love that this collection is anything but cutesy. I like my Halloween properly ooky and spooky! And year-round, really.