Expanding a palette

A recent project demonstrated clearly to me how expanding a palette can make a more interesting quilt.  I recently got a ruler that makes it easy to cut isoceles triangles, and wanted to make a quilt with just the one shape.  I opened my drawer of hand-dyed fabrics, and picked out a few colors I had done this summer and was really happy with the limited palette I pulled--mauves, lavender, blues, and greens. 

 My first layout:

I liked these colors, but they seemed a little boring. 

I tried adding in light blue to get larger range of values:

Then I added black and cream:

I took out the black and cream, and added in yellow and orange--better!

Finished front of quilt:

Cutting the triangles left me with a lot of beautiful scraps.  I pieced them together together, intending to use them for the back of the quilt:

After adding in some additional large pieces of my hand-dyed fabric, I decided this deserved to be the front of another quilt.  

For the outer edge, I used a "faux-piped binding technique:

I made two "chunky log cabins" to be the backs for the two quilts.  I enjoyed making these, working with the large supply of commercial solids that I have in my stash.  But in making backs larger than the fronts (as one does to help in the sandwiching/quilting process), I didn't take well enough into account the finished size of the back.  Top and bottom edges are fine, but the intention was to have wider pieces on the right and left sides of both backs: