Tips and Tricks: Looking Thru Rose Coloured Glasses

I love making simple block quilts with charm squares and pieced block quilts with different prints on them.  Deciding on the arrangement of the blocks in the top can be a little tricky, however, as I've found in the past that my quilts don't always have the balance between dark and light blocks that I'm aiming for.

For example, look at this quilt from last year:




I wouldn't call this a "total fail" - but you cansee that the dark pinks are clustered in the upper half, and the stripe blocks aren't quite as evenly distributed as they might be.  It's not like I just threw the blocks down willy-nilly; I did spend considerable time arranging them.  But when I'm sorting through and deciding how to arrange blocks like these, it isn't long before my eyes become a little fatigued.

Then I saw a product review for "Sew Red Glasses". And became intruiged.  I looked for an Australian source for them, but couldn't find one, so I decided to just buy a pair of cheap red-lense glasses on eBay - and here they are:

Here's a quilt I'm working on now.  There are only 12 blocks here, so not really a lot of options on where to put things.  Even so, when I put on the glasses, I'll see the blocks differently.

Here's the same block arrangement seen through the glasses. 

The red in the glasses makes the image more monochrome/greyscale, and so colour becomes less obvious and contrast between the lighter/darker prints more obvious, making it easier to check the balance.

I suspect that the Sew Red Glasses work much better than my cheapo eBay glasses do, but it's a step in the right direction!