These are the two layouts I will be incorporating in my French Braid quilt. There will be two braids of each. Do they look like they are laid out okay? I will start on it as soon as I get the seashell fabric in I ordered.

Can you try layout 2 with the dark-to-light gradation in the browns reversed?

can you loosely braid them for effect to see the contrast in cross over? I am very literal and visual sorry!

Well, I do see the water, beach, land colorway you might be going for, especially if you're waiting for some seashell fabric to add. ;-)

French Braid quilts are usually all about value gradiation - light to dark, either going up or down.

Now you could have another plan, and that's perfectly fine, but if I print out the picture of, say, Layout#1, in black and white, I see the values are all over the place. Even within a color, it's not light to dark or dark to light. It's more like med, dark, light.

There isn't a great value difference between any of your darks and lights - again, that's fine - it can be very subtle if that's your preferred palette.

But as set up here, there isn't a noticeable pattern/path/gradation to the fabrics.

See how it looks if you put the 3 green fabrics in order of light/med/dark . Do the same with the blues. Then for the tans, reorder then in the - L-M-D, even though there are more of them.

Can you take a pic so we can see how that looks?

I tried to redo layout 1 twice. The difference is very subtle in some of the colors so it was kind of hard. There is only 1 true brown color in this layout. This was a jelly roll that I bought from connecting threads.

The blue and greens look much better, I think, this way.

You have 3 fabrics with the same pattern.

The tan one is the one causing the problem. Take it out and see how it flows. Also, ooc, what are you using for the squares?

Also, again ooc, what would the tans look like if there were only 3 fabrics - the right most, the one next to it, skip one, and the 4 the one in (not counting whatever background fabric it's all laying on).

What does it look like with only those 9 fabrics?
What does the seashell fabric look like?

Sorry, I don't mean it to sound so rapid-fire, I'm sort of just writing what I would be thinking/saying if we were in the same room and this was up on the design wall. ;-)

I think you need to keep the dark brown, dark green and dark blue for contrast. They draw the eye.

Can you try making each color group shade from lightest to darkest (so the darkest color of each group will be next to the lightest of the next group)?

I love the effect you're going for - and can't wait to see the end result!

I will be using this fabric for the middle squares and background: http://fabric4less.com/index.php?mai...x&cPath=67_308

I will be using this fabric as accents (helping to frame middle strips in between braids) and possibly the small squares of the braid (or the seashell-haven't completely decided): http://www.connectingthreads.com/col...ics__L117.html
(the planetary nebula)

Maybe I should find a darker brown and get rid of the dark tan one.

I wanted to try to keep all the tans because I am trying to make the quilt as close to queen size as possible (I want it to be larger than a lap)

I appreciate your help. This will be my first french braid quilt. It is a gift for my granparents.