Where Do You Shelve Your Rusts?

I bought a few men's shirts to use in the Orca Bay Mystery quilt by Bonnie K. Hunter at http://quiltville.blogspot.com/p/orca-bay-mystery.html which starts on Friday. I finished cutting those up this evening. I decided I would like a few more fat quarters of gold and rust, so I went to Joanns to look for some. I looked first at the orange fat quarters, and I only found one I thought would work. I then picked up a few gold fat quarters since the yellows were right next to the oranges. I kept looking and found all the rusts in with the browns. I tend to shelve my rusts with the oranges, though I do have a few darker ones with the browns.

This brought up an interesting quandary. If I use rust and brown will there be enough contrast between them? I had decided to use brown as my background color, and green, rust, and gold as my colors. I finally dug out some fabrics tonight, and this is what I have so far.


The top row shows my browns, I eliminated the most of the lighter browns, and any orange-y browns. The middle row shows my golds and "rusts" which after I eliminated the browner ones, are leaning towards burnt orange. I think I will still eliminate the "rust" on the far right, it is blending in with browns too much. On the bottom I have my greens, I'm going for more of an evergreen feel in my greens.

All of these were pulled from my men's shirt stash or my less than one yard pieces. I can certainly come up with some more variety by looking at my yardage.

On the bottom left of the photo, you can see a couple of my bags of strings. The bottom bag has all green strings, the top bag has browns, yellows, and oranges all mixed together. Obviously I am rather short on those colors, so whichever color I choose for the strings will have to be supplemented. I made an autumn colored string quilt the end of last year, and I pretty much used all of my fall-colored strings up on that. I made a green string quilt last year too, but that was the beginning of last year, so I've had more time to replace them. I don't like to cut strings on purpose, I just have them as by-products of squaring up my fabric, so I'm hoping I can just add enough from my 1 1/2" and 2" strip drawers to work. I normally only have strings narrower than 1 1/2", but this time I'll be using what I have on hand. I may cut some 2 1/2" strips in half, and use those for strings too. I'll just have to see.

Now I need to decide which color to use for which of Bonnie's colors. Who knows, tomorrow I may rethink it all and decide to use cream as my background after all!