A gradation of colors

Who thought I would find the time this week to update my blog what with all the craziness of getting ready to go on vacation but I an rather excited about this weeks project.  I ran into a fat quarter sale the other week and so I pick up these 3 fabrics that I thought would make an interesting bowl.  I didn't go whole hog and make a large bowl since I didn't know it I was going to like these colors once they were fashioned into a bowl.  I ended up really liking the red and the orange together and found that out by working in an orange stripe in the base of the bowl.  I could easily see that they did look nice together but what was lacking was some contrast.  Since the orange fabric had not only a bit of red in it but also some green I thought I would separate the two colors with a green stripe.  Once I took a look at it outside in the natural light, I found myself very attracted to it.  Should I make another one but a bit bigger with the orange on the bottom and the red on the top?  What came to mind is this photo of a multi colored scrap bowl my friend Margaret sent to me and I really loved this HUGE bowl she had made which had plenty of red, orange and green in it and also some yellow.

The first thing I needed to decide was what order was I going to put the colors in.  Why not start with green?  It wasn't my plan to have a gradation of colors but as I was working with the green it just sort of happened.  I started out with lime green and gradually shifted into darker tones and then added strips that gradually shifted the color over to gold and then to yellow.  I was digging around through my baby bib fabrics when I found the perfect fabric for the transition from yellow over to orange.  I had so many oranges and orangey reds to choose from that the transition from the orange to the red ended up being the smoothest transition of all.  At this point the bowl had grown to a HUGE size so I topped it off with a blaze of red.  This bowl is the size of a small waste basket and is by a long shot the largest bowl I have ever made.  One does go through a LOT of thread when making something this size.  I set out to make a scrappy bowl so I was not shy about using very small scraps.  The upshot to this is that the project actually ended up nicer than I thought it was going to since this was my first attempt with not only a HUGE bowl but also a scrappy one.  I took it into the Shelburne Arts Co-op to hopefully sell and I failed to measure  it so I cannot actually say how wide or tall it is but I ended up running out of all the different colors of thread, in fact I lost track on how many different times I changed the tread due to the spool running out but, I am pleased with the result  and learned a lot while I was making it about gradations of colors and the nuances of the gradual changing of the colors within each color and also the transitions.   I'm thinking now that perhaps the next one will be a bit smaller!