Where do you start with choosing colors and fabrics for a quilt? There is no wrong answer it seems, but there are approaches that resonate more deeply than others. The best quilts speak to your heart, messages that soothe or celebrate or encourage, or they let your heart spill out in visible form. What sort of color creativity will best feed your soul in the weeks to come?
Since we’re about to start sewing along as a community to make the Under the Maple Tree quilt, let’s explore this question with that project in mind.
Reflection + Peace
When the heart seeks peace, look to simple color schemes. Few colors, gentle contrast, a predictable palette. Choose something that reflects nature, for an extra dose of grounding energy.
With Under the Maple Tree quilt, you could go for consistent leaves - all green/yellow or all red/orange, for example. A whole tree full of the same color or the same limited palette, comforts the heart with repetition.
This autumn-inspired palette exemplifies that sort of peaceful energy. The color palette is super limited: just muted reds, brown and oranges. Its predictability creates space for reflection. This making energy is similar to knitting or crocheting - busy hands, restful soul.
Background fabric: Art Gallery Sweet Macadamia.
Accent fabric: Art Gallery Cinnamon.
Freedom + Discovery
The polar opposite of rest is discovery, and the polar opposite of simple is scrappy! If your heart is pushing against the edges of your life, looking for room to grow and to explore, go for a scrappy palette without borders.
A quilt like this offers total freedom. Find out along the way, what sort of blocks you like best and invite that even to change day by day. It’s a quilt that reveals itself, revealing you too. And since it is built on the foundation of consistent background and accent fabrics, you can venture out assured that the end result won’t be totally chaotic.
Background fabric: Tilda Soft Teal.
Accent fabric: FreeSpirit Spark Gold.
Beauty to Savor
Sometimes my soul is already stamped with inspiration. Perhaps I’ve purchased a fabric bundle that I long to explore. In this case my heart has already responded and attached to a beautiful vibe. I seek in my quilt to honor that energy, to savor and celebrate it.
And so, stained glass becomes a quilt…
Background fabric: Art Gallery Coconut Milk.
Accent fabric: Tilda Mustard.
When a strong visual inspiration is your starting point, the challenge is recognizing the potential and limitations of beauty’s reincarnation. Your version will be different. It will be new. You will transform your inspiration even as you savor it.
Starting with a fabric bundle is much easier than moving from a photograph, painting or other piece of art towards cloth. What to keep in mind with our quilt? Under the Maple Tree has many small pieces, so it’s best used to savor medium to small-scale fabrics, like those in this Ruby Star Autumn bundle.
Feelings to Release
Creativity can also be cathartic. Some of my best works emerged from a painful or overwhelming time, when I allowed my feelings to become tangible. Releasing energy often creates an intense palette. Think high contrast and colors that are quite dark or quite light or highly saturated, as with Inhibition, which was a break up quilt.
Sometimes, when your feelings are negative, it may seem counterproductive to out them in cloth. Wouldn’t that make them worse? Magnify them, even?
That’s for you to decide, but I will say that it has not been so for me. Each time that I have expressed my pain in cloth, I have been surprised by the beauty that emerges. When we confront the darkness, we make real space for the light to appear around the edges.
I made this mock up today to release feelings of sorrow and regret. Sewing this quilt would create space for processing those feelings and invite me to acknowledge the good things that endure.
Background fabric: Art Gallery Sugar Plum
Accent fabric: Art Gallery Coffee Bean
Have you ever sewn a cathartic quilt? If you’re always drawn to scrap quilts, could that say something about your longing for discovery? Have these reflections helped you narrow in on the palette that will satisfy your heart?
I would love to know!
The Under the Maple Tree Sew-Along starts October 6th! Until then you can - - -
yes! I actually did not start making any significant quilts until my mother died.
I think everything I created after that loss in 2016?
So, my mom never saw that process with me. My father did. He was pretty surprised by what had blossomed. I had been caring for my parents since 2013. Gosh, interesting inquiry, Rachel.
I have never made an angry quilt but I have made plenty of emotional quilts.
I have made only one quilt where all of the blocks are the same
I made my first (test) maple leaf yesterday.
I have often felt that quilt making was very cathartic to processing my emotions, but not from the basis of the colors being the grounding spot! I’m very intrigued to look into that idea more deeply.