Color harmonies are Like a chorus, where Colors SING NOTES together in Perfect pitch.
When your quilts lack color harmonies, it’s like a four-part, out-of-tune rendition of Row Row Row Your Boat at summer camp. You know when it sounds bad, but which campers are croaking off key?!
We’ve all done it. Like sewing a bunch of quilt blocks and realizing the colors are off. Or not like you imagined. You’re not sure why or how to fix it.
Ding! Ding! We have a road map to color mastery in the Playful Color Quilt Guild, where color confidence is our goal. We say a big “Yes, please!” to creating colorful quilts with the time, money and love we’ve invested into a beloved hobby.
Recently our Playful Color Quilt Guild members learned how to create color harmonies using a color wheel. Going a step further, they created a personal color palette – colors that make you happy to see them – and used them in color combinations. Then, they took a giant leap around the color wheel with this month’s challenge: Choose a color harmony and make a sample quilt block with your personal color palette.
Get ready for some eye-popping color!
START WITH A Color Wheel
Sir Isaac Newton, inventor of calculus and the law of gravity, also created the color wheel. Thanks to Newton, the first scientist knighted by the Queen of England, choosing colors for your quilt is less guesswork and more fun with a color wheel.
Color harmonies are color combinations based on a color wheel. Commonly known color combinations are primary (red, yellow and blue), complementary (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet) and monochromatic (all the same tints and shades of one color); lesser known but equally powerful are analogous, triad, tetrad, split complementary and square.
Bottom line: Choosing colors based on these combinations will make your quilts sing the Hallelujah Chorus or Pharrell Williams’ Happy. Quilts can do that.
Thanks to color wheel inventor Sir Isaac Newton, choosing colors for your quilt is less guesswork and more fun.
OUr members tell the story – Color Harmonies get the glory
Can you identify the color harmonies shown in their beautiful blocks below?
Are you excited about the possibilities of quilting in color? Becoming color-confident? Learn more here…
Color is so much fun – and rewarding – when you’ve got skills. Move over, Napoleon Dynamite.
As you can see, our members got ’em! Color mastery can be learned and eyes can be trained to see colors better. Learn more about how we take you from color muddler to color master here!
Bryan House Quilts was founded by award-winning quilter, author and fabric designer, Rebecca Bryan in 2012. Rebecca experienced a color revolution when she used rainbow colors in her designs, moving her from color muddler to color master. Today she teaches thousands of quilters about choosing color palettes and modern piecing techniques through her courses, books and patterns. Her work is described as fun, modern, playful, classic, and always colorful. Creating a guild of playful color quilters achieved one of her rainbow-colored dreams where quilters are better when they learn and play together.
