Does anyone else have a real problem with green?
 

This drives me crazy!!! I have all kinds of shades of green in my stash and can never find the right one - or ones. I avoid green like I would avoid a runaway train. However, I want to use them. I organize my stash drawers by color all the time. Most of them make perfect sense but my green drawer is a disaster. Avocado, celery, olive, kelly, hunter, lime, etc. Why is it that I cannot for the life of me make sense of green? Maybe a food issue??

I think there are too many shades of green. The one I might want is never in my stash. I have a problem with orange. I just don't appreciate it. I barely consider it a color. Must have been because I drank too much Orange Crush when I was a child. :)

Dina

It's the same thing with my machine embroidery thread. I bought a set of 300 colors, and it came with a lot of greens. I also purchased additional spools of green from different manufacturers. I never have the green I envision for my embroidery. However, I keep running out of sage...

It's funny that you mention that. I've been organizing my fabrics and I separated a whole stack of what I'm affectionately calling Ugly Greens. Not really sure what I had in mind for them! Green does seem to be a tricky color.

I have a friend who is a great gardner, and she told me you have to get the greens right in a flower garden before you can add color. Must apply to fabric, too.

I love green...favorite color...all greens, especially the darker ones and the avocado greens. I don't use the really bright greens, tend to stay with the duller ones because of the colors I like. There are a lot of shades of green, and different ones go better with different colors. I have 2 bins of red, 1 bin of blue, 1/2 bin each of purple and pink, 1/2 bin each of yellow and orange, and 4 bins of greens (as well as bins of black, brown, tans, and lights). I think the more you work with color, the better you can figure out what is the best green to use with the other colors you are choosing for your quilt.

I think greens are difficult because the blue undertone and the yellow undertones are so far apart. I have trouble figuring which drawer it goes in..blues, beiges, browns or green. I constantly find FQs in the wrong drawer.

Maybe we should have a "green with envy" challenge. Everyone mails their ugliest green fat quarter to the person next on the list and you HAVE to make a quilt top with the fat quarter to mail back to the original owner of the fat quarter. They can do with it as they wish. LOL

PS I just made this up, but it kinda sounds fun.

That really makes sense!! I have a real problem with greens also!!!

I'm not a green person either; my stack of greens never has what I need and I've been building stash for over 30 years! I get my greens from my 87 year mother's stash much of the time, LOL.:rolleyes:

Jan in VA

Greens my favorite color. My eyes are green. A room just doesn't look right without it. It's nature's neutral. It changes with the seasons: spring green-clean leans to yellow, summer green-bright, fall green-full bodied leans to yellow: winter yellow-dark, greyed and leans to blue. Then peuce looks great with purples. Lime with purple and salmon. LOVE GREEN

I'm in the LOVE green group! Sage, forest, "army"...you name it, I love the darker greens. Paired with rust, amber, tans, browns...right up my alley. My problem is with reds...I never have the right shade!

I feel your pain. There is a piece of fabric that I've had for some time. It's a floral print with a black background. I'd love to find green fabric to match the leaves. There are two shades of what I call dusty jade. Every green I find is either too yellow or too blue.

I love greens, but I agree that what I have is generally not what I want. One early spring day a friend and I drove to her quilt class. She commented on the hundreds of shades of green around us in the woods. So true!

i have that problem with just about every color in the rainbow. LOL
greens and yellows are the biggest problem for me, though.
i have plenty of each but never the right fabric for any given project.

i think it's time i reversed my process.
instead of deciding on a quilt and then searching for the fabrics ...
gather a set of fabrics and search for the right quilt to use them in.

wish me luck. LOL

I have lots of greens also. I have noticed over the past few years, that most of the Christmas lines that come out, have greens with yellow in them. I have not been able to find a pretty print that is a true christmas green in a long time.

My latest issue of Quiltmaker has a wall hanging Heart to Heart that shows it in greens. After having made the red one, I am going for the green one. Maybe this pattern would give you 'permission' to put those greens together. It is a Dresden plate/fan design so maybe that will be an inspiration.

So true about Christmas green. I do not buy greens with yellow in them, ugly.
I have lots of basic greens that I use with no problems.
Reds are a problem with so many shades. I use mostly burgundy reds.

My problem is I really like green, one look at my stash and you can see the stacks of green. As you mentioned, getting the "right" green can be a quest.

Green has always been my favorite color. I never had much green quilting fabric other than what I wanted for leaves until my Mom bought a sage green sofa. Now that's the shade I shop for - what a difference in the green colors! I have enjoyed all the new shopping I can do....

I paint in watercolors and oils and green is the hardest to do. It gives me fits.

I don't like yellow. I rarely use it. We each have our preferences.

I love green. But I tend to use more of the very dark olive green and forest green most of the time For projects. I hardly ever use lime green. Green to me is a color that can give the final touch to a project. But finding the color I want in fabric stores can be a problem.

I agree with your thinking. I find myself in the same situation as well.

I love green, also, but this thread has made me think... When I was trying to build my stash before retiring, one of the online quilt shops had a sale of 10 different half yard cuts for a low price. They were sold by color. I didn't have much green or orange fabric, so I ordered a set of green and orange. The orange fabric was just OK but the green fabric had some beautiful pieces in it! Problem is, I can never find the right fabric to go with it... Too bad we don't all live close enough to meet and have a "green swap" !

My problem with green is I don't like it. I have more blues, purples, bright colors, red white and blue.

Green is an odd color because each green carries hints of other colors in it. I use lots of green but when I get a pile of what some one called "ugly greens", I put them all in one quilt and what do you know they are not at all ugly as one would think. I made a 1600 quilt from greens and have the plans for a forest of paper pieced triangles to whittle down my "uglies" scrap greens pile. I know it will be beautiful in the end. No forest, coppice, thicket or wood lot is ever one shade of green. Ahhhhh, as a Michigander, I just my vistas of trees.

Raising hand... and it is such a lovely color.

I know what you mean. I had to use green for vines (the quilt in my icon) and had a really hard time finding the color I wanted. For me, this is one of those colors I don't stash- I get what I need and try to use it all!

I have a lot of greens. They come in very handy when I'm making controlled scrappies where each block requires just the right color combination. There's often floral patterned fabric in these blocks with a wide variety of shades of green leaves. I recently completed 20 blocks (ea. 12" sq. finished) for Blackford's Beauty. There's a lot of different shades of green in those 20 blocks. I use a lot of different shades of green for applique, too.

However, I have trouble with yellows and pinks.

Heard once to look around you outside at all the different shades of green ... you have light and dark and bright and dull and blue-green (blue spruce) and yellow-green (potato vine) and they all look wonderful together. Have also been told that green is the only color that you can use multiple shades and tones of and have it all work together in a project and I've found, for me, it to be true.

I use alot of greens. I find all colors come in so many different shades. Some shades of colors just seem to not match.

I have the same problem with red. Green is my favorite color, so I have lots to chose from. I am not a big fan of red, tho and never seem to have the right shade when I need it, even though I have tried.

How about starting with your stash, use colors that Co
mpliment them.

my worse color is reds..I think Im color blind when I have to choose colors of red..lol

When I am using green I look at the other colors as well. If there are yellows in the scheme, then you need greens with yellow undertones, the same with the blues. If there are reds, it depends on whether it is an orangey red or a bluer red. Try using a color wheel to help figure out which greens to use.

If you find storing your fabric and into what bin to place it, I might have a solution for you. I had a lot of scrapbook paper when I quit scrapbooking and started quilting. I fold a 12 X 12 piece of card stock in half and wrap my fabric around it, including fat quarters. As long as the fabric fits around the card I wrap it. They are organized on my shelf which is 12 1/2" high and 8 inches deep by color. All the greens are together. There is no deciding which bin it goes in as they are all there. I don't have a huge stash, and don't want one, but I find when I can see all I have at a glance, I use more of what i have, before I go out and buy a specific color to work into my project. Color shades are ever changing from year to year, and sometimes if you are using older fabric, it is hard to match up the new ones to it, especially green. Good luck I have the same problem matching greens.

Orange Red is a magic color. You can mix all shades of reds from madder to strawberry if you include a bit of Orange red in the mix...maybe there is a magic green too. I sort my out my greens by yellow and black...some greens have a bit of yellow, lime, Kelly, and some have a bit of black, avocado, forest. You can mix all black/greens together with harmony and so also with all yellow greens. Go to the paint department of your local box store and gather up as many green paint chips as you can. Then go play with mixing green tones and tints to your hearts content and you will learn something about color theory. Also if you want a gorgeous mix here is one I have found...lime, avocado, forest greens mixed with dark chocolate brown. I brown is you major color then the greens smile and play nice.

cwessel, I have your solution to sorting greens. To handle this color you must break it down into its components. Green is a secondary color, ie. it is made up of two primary colors--yellow and blue. Divide your stash greens into blues, yellows and a few true greens. Done, easy! This also provides you with ease of matching to other colors.Choose yellow with yellow, blue with blue, and so on. Simple.Of course then we get into using complementary colors, red and green(opposites on the color wheel--and I strongly recommend that you get a standard artist's color wheel, if you don't already have one. It makes color matching easy.) And that is a whole nother lesson in color theory!
All that said, green is a color of poor reputation. It is the color of envy, a sin. It is also the color of war and violence--soldiers wear green to be concealed. Think of Sherwood forest and Robin Hood. It is a hue that tends to set off bad vibes in viewers. Every public school and hospital used to be painted that awful shade of green, remember? A bad choice psychologically. I too have a fondness for deep greens and have a huge collection of them. And almost never use them because people just don't want them. I've been considering pairing the greens with other colors to make them read more friendly. End of lesson, I'll go now!