Color Play for Quilters
Welcome back to the final day of "Craftsy Sweetens Up My Quilting Life!" blog hop. I hope you've gained useful knowledge about classes and products, entered Craftsy's big Giveaway, and the other giveaways sponsored by our own bloggers. Check below for more information.
Sandra from mmm! quilts and I are wrapping up today, but the Giveaways will remain open for another week. All class discounts remain in effect one week from posting so take advantage of them soon! The entire blog schedule can be found here.
My first encounter with Color Play by Joen Wolfrom was while searching for books on color theory. The book reviews were outstanding, and it stayed on my radar.
Imagine my delight finding the book offered as a class taught by the author herself at Craftsy! Plus, the book I was after was a free download with the class--a win/win!
Personal Insights
- Comfortable speaker with extensive knowledge
- Lecture intensive with strong visual aids
- Heavy use of hand dyed fabrics lending itself well to both traditional and art quilters
- Materials list supports the class well
- Over 4 hours of instruction
- Excellent question and answer portion relevant to the class
- Most comprehensive course in color theory I have seen to date
"Do what you see. Not what you know."
Many of us struggle with picking out colors for a project, and to a large degree she teaches us why. She stresses the value of experimenting with colors in the form of acrylic paints creating your own samples. Blending colors and working with a color wheel was not new to me, yet she took me beyond what I'd ever done before. I had to learn how to see colors all over again, and by doing so I could use them to my advantage.
Luminosity
By far, the most interesting thing I learned was creating luminosity within a quilt. Luminosity refers to an area of light or glowing, and Wolfrom explains how she found it by mistake. Even so, she stopped to figure out why it happened so she would be able to recreate it.
Practical Application
Let's face it. Classes don't do any good unless you can use what you've learned. That might be the one downfall with taking a live class. One, it's hard to get your questions answered, and two, we forget things once we've gotten home. That doesn't happen when you can go back and repeat the segment for a brush up.
I want to briefly share how the class has changed the way I look at fabric. This is a FQ bundle of Tokyo Train Ride by Sarah Watts. I've been saving it for something special, but nothing jumped out at me. I wanted to figure out why.
Normally I would lay my fabric out so I could stand back and take a good look at it. If I thought it needed something more, I'd throw some more colors down with it like in the first picture on the left. This fabric collection was leaving me stumped, so following Wolfrom's instruction I brought in a color wheel to see where most of the fabric were. I believe it was a double-complementary scheme. (middle picture above)
Building on Wolfrom's examples of adding a variety of values, I continued to add and subtract more fabrics. Another 'problem' I found with this bundle, and is often the case when we buy a single line of fabric, nearly all the the fabrics were the same scale. I tossed in dots in a variety of scales, and some micro prints. The last photo bottom right shows you what I wound up with. There's a balance between the lights, mediums, darks, and in scale finally. It's still a double-complementary color scheme, but a bit more balanced too. We shall see how this one works.
Someone who has made a quilt, and couldn't figure out what was wrong with the colors
Someone who wants to know how a color wheel works, and how it can make her much more successful at choosing fabrics
Someone who is ready to go beyond constructing from a kit
Someone who wants to delve deeply into color theory
How about YOU?
Buy Color Play for Quilters this week for 50% off its regular price. While visiting Craftsy, sign up for the chance to win one of two free classes, or the grand prize of a quilt kit, and fabric bundles.
The Giveaway entry to Craftsy can be found both here and on each post throughout the hop. One entry per person. Enter until Sunday, February 21, 2016 at 11:59 MST. Winners will be announced February 22.
Hope you had as much fun hopping as we have!
Come on, Doxie girls.
Let's go sew.
