Hello dear students and fans,
One of the popular classes I have taught over the years is a class on Color Theory. I started teaching this class in response to several situations I encounter on a fairly regular basis. One is the scenario where a student might tell me they don’t feel confident about assembling their own color schemes for their projects; they are fine when recreating a palette identical to that in a pattern or book but feel overwhelmed if they walk into a quilt shop to pick their own composition. The other common scenario is when someone tells me they ARE color confident – they know what they like and picked colors they loved when they spread them out to work with but upon completion of their quilt, they didn’t like it and are not sure what went wrong.
Yet another more abstract concept is that we tend to confuse pattern with color, we are quick to dismiss a promising pattern simply because we don’t like the color we see a sample made from not realizing that we might love it if it were in a different color scheme – I am guilty of this myself.
If any of these sound familiar to you then you might consider taking my color class. It is a very thorough exploration of color using a series of cut and paste exercises on how color behaves, how to use color to emphasize pattern and design and what common mistakes are made in working with color. Color is basically a science and you can learn the skills of working with it even if you do not have an intuitive color sense. In addition, you will learn how to pick great color compositions by using a color wheel along with some other ‘innovative’ approaches that will allow you to pick unique color combinations that yield stunning results in your quilts.
Fabric is far too expensive these days to risk investing that kind of outlay (both financial and the time spent) only to be disappointed in the finished quilt. My class is scheduled for this coming Thursday, January 25th, at A Common Thread; contact the shop to register for the class. If you can’t make this class, it will be repeated again in the Spring.
Meanwhile, for your enjoyment, check out these two quilts in progress made by a couple of students in my Maplewood class at A Common Thread last week. These are both the same color scheme pulled from a formula on a color wheel – and a rather challenging one to make look sophisticated (usually). Both are stunning and though based on the same formula, each is uniquely different from the other.
