Making waves

(Beach scene quilt pattern available here now)

Last night I made the waves section of the beach quilt - the water part of the centre panel. My plan was for the water at the sides to be a continuation of the reef across the bottom and hence be 'underwater' and for the centre to be from above, showing waves - and a boat.

I spread out the potential fabrics across the top (nice and neat to start with!) the water to sand fabric across the bottom as a starting point, and the 2 side panels to help keep colour contrast/balance.

One of the ways of differentiating the two (apart from the inclusion of boats, turtles etc. and the border which I'll add shortly) is the use of different shades of blue. This was made difficult by the fact that the wonderful print shown here of the waves running up the sand is quite greenish, and I wanted this section more blue than aqua. It took a while to get a decent gradation of colour, and I started by building it up from the sand - the actual sand I'll do tomorrow.