Considering Fabric Color – Part 1

Last week I reviewed how to choose and match prints when picking out fabric. For this week and next I will concentrate on tips for choosing the colors of fabric for your quilts. I’ll cover a bit of color theory too that will assist in your choices. Choosing the fabrics based on color, contrast, how they play off each other are things to consider when shopping. So, let’s talk about color!

Color Basics – Contrast and Color

One of the basic things you want to think about along with color is the contrast between fabrics you choose. Color and contrast actually go hand in hand. If you want your block designs to boldly stand out, you want fabrics that highly contrast with each other. If you want your quilt to read quieter, chose fabrics that have less contrast with each other.

Contrast is achieved by considering the value (tint or shade) of the each color you choose. For example, pink is a tint of red where maroon is a shade of red. This photo below shows that:

Knowing the difference between shade, tone and tint and how that effects the contrast between your fabrics can go a long way in helping you choose fabrics.

• Shade is taking the pure color, for instance blue, and adding black to it to make it darker, for a dark blue.
• Tint is taking the pure blue and adding white to make it lighter, making a light blue.
• Tone is adding grey to a pure color to make it less intense. Most colors around us in the world are tones of pure color.

Here’s an example of auditioning fabrics for contrast. This first stack of fabrics below has pieces very close in shade so there is hardly any contrast:

Use that selection above for a “quiet”quilt. Now look what happens when I replace two of the fabrics with colors that are a lighter (tinted) version of the same color it replaced:

See the change? This will make elements of your quilt pattern more enhanced so it will stand out. So far I have used all “cool” colors. Look what happens when I remove two of those fabrics and replace them with fabrics that fall into the “warm” category:

Another way to choose colors when at the quilt shop is the color wheel. This is something you can carry with you to remind you of how colors contrast and which colors are “warm” or “cool”. Here’s my color wheel:

You can tell by looking at it, which colors are warm and which are cool.  Notice how the colors next to each other on the wheel have less contrast between them than colors further away. For the highest contrast, choose colors that are opposite on the wheel.

Alternate Ways to Achieve Contrast

As you know if you are a regular blog reader, I am mainly a scrap quilter. I love to use a lot of different color fabrics of all types of prints in my quilts. Scraps quilts are a riot of crazy contrasts so, how do I achieve an interesting contrast in a scrap quilt as a design element? Here’s how.

One way is to add consistent color into the scrap quilt. I will often add in one uniform color that ties things together, making it look less chaotic. Here’s two of my quilt patterns below that do that:

 

In It’s a Tie , on the left, I added in the black stars for some contrast to the rest of the table runner in the front. I usually use a black or other dark print when I want to add contrast into a scrap quilt. The quilt on the right, Follow the Stars, has a crisscross design created by strategic placement of black print fabric in each scrap block.

A second way to achieve contrast is to alternate between cool and warm colors for your blocks. Here’s an example of two blocks in a quilt of mine:

 

The block on the left is all cool colors and the block on the right is all warm colors. Alternating blocks like this in a quilt creates contrast in your quilt as the blocks play off each other. Here’s the whole quilt that shows how the contrast works:

The blocks above are more uniform in color than a lot of my scrap quilts, but you could make all nine blocks in different color combinations, making sure to make four of them in warm combos and the other five in cool combos to get the same effect.

Finally, working in contrast can come from the background fabric too. With  my quilt, Marbles & Jacks, I created contrast by alternating the light and dark backgrounds of the blocks and between warm and cool colors as well.

If the background fabric in these quilt blocks was a uniform tan print, it would be a little quieter.

So that’s it for this week. Next week, we’re going to put some of these concepts into action as we choose fabric.

Happy Quilting and Happy Holidays!
Deanne