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So how do I pick color?
After all these “lessons,” someone might ask how I usually pick colors for my quilts. Usually, the idea for the quilt pops into my head, and usually the colors are fairly clear from the start. A rare exception was Circular Paradox,
which began with a notion for a deep, space-dark blue background, a leftover nautilus shell from another quilt, and some of my brighter hand-dyes, but nothing more specific. In that case, I grabbed colors, laid them on top of the fabric I had selected for the background and then chose what worked best. The arrangement of colors, however, was deliberate…sprinkling warm next to cool, keeping a balance and, now that I look at it, a diagonal progression of warm colors from top-left to lower-right.
I’ve also been on an autumn kick for a couple of years—I love autumn colors, but with my skin tone, I can’t wear them at all. But my best friend is a gorgeous redhead, and she loves and wears these colors well.
In playing and quilting and working together, dyeing fabric together, we’ve managed to cross-pollinate our color sensibilities, and now she’s using my teals, and I’m using her russets and oranges! (Gee….ya think we get along so well because we’re complementary ….ooooh bad pun, ducking and please don’t throw rotten oranges–grin!)
In cases where I’m taking my cues from nature, the pallette is set for me, I just have to look and read it and interpret it in fabric.
I finished “What Secrets Does the Forest Hold” (quilt below) this spring, inspired by the announcement last year that after more than 60 years, they have confirmed that the ivory-billed woodpecker, believed extinct, is still alive in the swamps of Arkansas! I dyed the background fabric specifically for this piece, a murky, swamp green. When I get a better camera, I’ll take another picture, because I really wish you could see the quilting in the background / green: more of the trees in the swamp-forest, and a silhouette of an ivory-billed in flight.
An older quilt, of Casablanca Lilies, has a background of cloth painted with thinned Setacolor
paints. But it is thereddish- russet stamens (you know that stuff that stains your clothes?) that contrast so strongly with the green that pops in this quilt.
And that’s plenty for now. Next, I’ll talk about how I use the color wheel when I get “stuck.”