Letting go of match-y match-y

Part 3 of Carolina Christmas is posted and I'm cutting out patches this morning - 192 blue rectangles and 592 (yes!) neutral squares. I may have to supplement my yardage to have enough neutrals, but that's not a problem. There's a lot more that will work with my initial selections. The thing is, I need to loosen up with the blue rectangles.

I had selected 13 blue fabrics, all various intensities of blue/green. I spread them out this morning and realized something.

I may be able to do scrappy but I'm still too hung up on match-y.

Seen all together like that, there wasn't enough difference between the fabrics. In the interest of cohesion, I had lost variety. Interesting.

So I went into my stash and started pulling more blues, this time looking more for coordination than similarity. In doing this, I incorporated more lights and more darks than I had before. I've got half the rectangles cut and stacked together and I'm liking how it looks. The golds and golden tans in the blocks already made are similar in saturation and tone but vary in pattern. The blue is going to give this quilt its spark, so I better start picking spark-y blues. Here's what I came up with:
Oh, and here's the 592 neutral squares (out of 22 different fabrics):Comfort zone here, me over there. It's a start.