Creating a Monochrome Graffiti Hearts Quilt

When I first designed Graffiti Hearts, I went all BRIGHT and BOLD with my color choices. I wanted the hearts to be a showstopper of a block, and I love the resulting quilt. I like to showcase the range of a pattern, so in making more Graffiti Hearts quilts with different color variations, I decided to make a monochrome Graffiti Hearts quilt.

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Making a Monochrome Graffiti Hearts Quilt:

Graffiti Hearts uses 11 colors plus background for a total of 12 fabrics in your quilt top. To create a monochrome Graffiti Hearts quilt, you’ll first have to pick your main color. I decided to go full-on Valentine’s with my choice of coral. I then pulled 11 different coral fabrics from my stash. I specifically looked for all shades of coral, ones that range more pink, ones that range more orange, as well as light and dark. This technique works for prints and solids, so I used prints! One tip is to pull more than 11 fabrics if you can. I started with 14 shades, and I pulled out the 3 that were not needed once I started organizing the fabrics. One stuck out as being too different from the rest, and the other two had color values that were too similar to other fabrics I preferred.

Organize your fabrics in lightest to darkest order. This is the fabric color that is associated with each shade:

With a monochrome Graffiti Hearts quilt, it is extremely helpful to label each fabric color so you don’t get them mixed up. Once I had all my fabrics laid out in lightest to darkest, I started pulling them out one by one to label them. I paid attention to which colors get paired together for HSTs, flying geese, and the strip sets. Because each ombre will be slightly different, it is worth evaluating each pair as you label them. If you feel a pair is too close in saturation value to each other, try swapping for the fabric next to it in the color order.

Here’s the pairs to be aware of:

• Color 1 & Color 2 : Half Square Triangles (HSTs)
• Color 3 & Color 4: Flying Geese
• Color 5 & Color 6: Strip Sets
• Color 7 & Color 8: Strip Sets

For example, in my coral version, I found that my flying geese fabrics looked too similar to each other, so instead of doing colors 1-5-4-11-7… in light to dark, I ended up doing 4-1-5-11-7… Moving color 4 from the third lightest fabric to the lightest fabric in the bunch made the flying geese values better. So once you have your ombre figured out, feel free to deviate! This blog post is mainly your starting point to help you get there.

Here was my mock-up once I had finalized my color order:

And don’t forget, Graffiti Hearts is meant to look like improv. So if you accidentally switch fabrics around or mess up in any way, as long as your blocks end up the right size, no one is ever going to know!

Graffiti Hearts is available in my shop in both paper and PDF formats. It comes with instructions for pillow, baby, and throw sizes.

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