Last week Rachel Hauser posted the first in her series Quilter’s Color Quest to accompany her recent book, A Quilter’s Field Guide to Color. I used some Christmas gift money to buy a copy of the book. Rachel uses colour (I just can’t help reverting to the English spelling!) to very good effect in all her quilt designs. She deliberately doesn’t begin the book with an explanation of the colour wheel – that comes later. In the first section she directs her readers to explore colour through the subjective lenses of temperature, the seasons and our emotions. The Field Guide is designed to be a practical book. There are 150 colour swatches to cut out, these can be used to complete the challenges dotted throughout the book and also to select fabrics to make the Bear Paw blocks Rachel suggests we make to test our choices.
And so to the temperature challenge: shuffle the card swatches, select warm and cool shades of purple and green. After some thought I choose Raisin and Spring as my warm shades with Iris and Clover as my cool shades.
Then it was time to rifle through my scrap fabric boxes. For the purple scraps… Well! Purple is one of my least used colours so the box is only half full. I managed to rustle together a couple each of warm and cool purple fabrics. My green box on the other hand is overflowing (despite making green blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge!). Looking through the scraps I realised most are warm yellow-greens, there wasn’t much choice at all when it came to picking out cool blue-green fabrics.
I looked about for a suitable background fabric and found some odds and ends of soft, unbleached Calico. I think this will look less stark than a white background but will offer contrast to most fabrics.
My colour temperature Bear Paw blocks
Looks like I have another scrap quilt in the making! I’m looking forward to the next challenge of the Quilter’s Color Quest 🙂
Linking with Rachel Hauser @stitchedincolor on Instagram with the hashtag #quilterscolorquest. Also linking up with Susan for Midweek Makers and Jennifer for Wednesday Wait Loss.
Allison
This will be fun way to explore color and you will have a great quilt when finished! 🙂
The Bear Paw blocks were fun to make. I hope I do gain better understanding my own sense of colour as well the theory.
Nice color combos.
Thank you Judy. Are you taking part in the Quilter’s Color Quest?
Sounds like a wonderful book! Your first blocks are beautiful. Thanks for sharing on Wednesday Wait Loss.
Looks like a worthwhile book – I’m always on the lookout for great ones!
Yes! I’d certainly recommend the book – it’s a good resource and I’m sure it will help me develop and understand my own sense of colour.