Quilter's Color Quest
inspiration for your color and fabric choices
How time does fly! It’s been more than five years since my book released: The Quilter’s Field Guide to Color: a Hands-on Workbook for Mastering Fabric Selection. Since then many quilt shops have and guilds have unpacked the concepts and exercises in the book as a group. Very cool!
Should you wish to work through the book as an individual, I have something that will help. I created Quilter’s Color Quest when my book released to encourage folks to really use the book. Follow along and enjoy!
Quilter’s Color Quest
Join me on a color journey, an experience of growth and self-actualization. The Quilter’s Field Guide to Color is a color + fabric workbook designed just for quilters! Creating effective fabric combinations is the #1 challenge quilters face. Let's change that, shall we?
Inside the book you'll find 150 color swatches just waiting for action. These color manipulatives will allow you to flesh out the concepts in the book, moving from seeing to doing.
The book walks you through 12 color exercises, with opportunity for expression first with swatches and then with fabric. Working with fabric helps you cross that divide from theory to practice. Selecting fabrics is not just about color. It's about scale and style and lots more - all of which we'll unpack layer by layer!
Getting Started
a 6-month plan for digesting the book
All About the Color Swatches
how to prep the swatches included with your book
Temperature
warm vs. cool colors (ex. warm and cool pinks)
Seasons
how the seasons inspire (ex. summer block)
Emotion
channel your emotions into choosing fabrics for a lively and therapeutic experience (ex. optimism block)
Color Wheel
complementary and analogous colors
Rainbow Blend
making smooth transitions between colors
All Colors In
exploring pastels, dusty colors and jewel tones (ex. pastel exercise)
Value
value in patchwork (ex. monochromatic palette)
Context
how color perception is fluid (ex. reimagine a difficult fabric)
Neutrals
how black, brown, white and gray each transform color
Story
use story to add depth and and texture to your choices (ex. picnic blocks)
Inspiration
gather and develop inspiration sources
Stash
how and why to build a fabric stash, including both helpful and limiting fabrics
Style
a filter to view a problematic fabric pull with fresh eyes
All Together Now
how to use your Quilter’s Quest blocks to make a quilt!
It was a labor of love to create this book, once upon a time, and it is so heartwarming that the quitting community finds it useful. My humble thanks to all my teachers and readers over the years. May your colors shine true!
xo, Rachel
Great to see this post this morning. Just this week, I just showed a friend my progress on going through the book. This may give me inspiration to keep going on the exercises!! Very timely. I think I got as far as the seasons and then life got in the way. I really love the colour swatches. They are very helpful to use to plan the bear paw blocks!
I participated in the sew along you did a few years ago. It was very interesting. I am sorry to say the blocks I made are still in my wip list.
I keep the swatches in a little box and show it to people to whom I intend to gift a quilt. It is a very useful tool, because the picture I have in my head when someone says 'I like green and pink' might be very different than what they have in mind