November is the tail end of the fall colours here in our area. We are past the bright reds and oranges of the maple trees we see in October, and a few storms have blown through and taken most of the leaves with them, leaving us with some yellows and oranges, a lot of bare trees, and the dark green of the evergreens.

This more muted colour palette was a bit of a challenge for me to apply to quilts, since I love to work with bright colours. But I was pleasantly surprised at the final look, and it has definitely put these colours on my radar for a future quilt.

November colour palette

I picked a range of burnt orange to yellow, to pair with a neutral that was inspired by the dried grasses I see on my daily walks, and a dark green for the pine trees that are now so much more visible in the forest.

The Kona solids in this palette are Cedar, Saffron, Cheddar, Scone, and Juniper.

Quilt Mockups

These are my favourite November mockups of my current patterns.

First up is Flocks of Colour, and I used the monochrome version of the pattern to mock this up. It only uses 5 colours for the flying geese, which worked well with this colour scheme. I added a lighter neutral (Kona Sand) as the background, and used the dark green for the binding as well to frame the quilt.

I love how this version of Bar Code turned out. I had to add another colour because this one requires 6 fabrics for the bars, but I decided to use the same neutral (Sand) that I used for the background on Flocks of Colour above.

The background for this quilt is Kona Snow, which is just enough off-white to work well with this colour scheme, but without giving it a yellow tinge.

Ripple & Swirl also required an extra colour to make the alternating rows stand out a bit more. This is a perfect pattern to use up scraps and stash fabrics in these colours. You don't have to stick to just 5 or 6 fabrics, but use the colour palette as a basis for your stash fabric pull.

This is the Ripple layout, but of course this could also be done in the Swirl layout.

I was going to just use quilts that are already available as standalone patterns in my shop, but then I really wanted to see what Dancing Hearts would look like in this colour palette. I love how it turned out! This is such a fun pattern to work with because of the secondary designs that come out depending on how colours are arranged. 

Dancing Hearts is not yet available as a standalone pattern, but you can get it in issue 56 of Make Modern magazine.