Colour Exercise #2

Hey hey Smites, I hope everything is good where you are. Life keeps throwing me curve balls at the moment, and I’m currently suddenly not at home for the next few weeks while we navigate my father in law’s sudden illness and a few other bits and pieces. Never simple but we plow along!

It’s been very fun for me seeing all your completed colour wheels coming into my inbox. I hope you had a good time fossicking for bits of fabric, and we’re going to do some more of that today.

Those of you that sent me colour wheels get a gold star for doing your homework! Here are some of the colour wheels I’ve been sent. Some interesting insights I found from looking at them - 

• almost everyone went for colours that were very close to primary

• almost everyone went for fabrics that were very close to solid, not patterned or multi coloured

As I’m unexpectedly not at home, I was a bit limited for this post by what I have thrown into my sewing basket before we left in a hurry - but that's actually made it more interesting as Ive had to work for my colour combos. Here are my primary colours:

And my colour wheel with secondary colours:

Today while I was pondering this post I had a play with some colour wheels that weren’t made from fabric. This is a good one to stretch you out a little bit. First I raided the fruit bowl, but I had to divert to the onion basket for the purple.

Then I had a walk through the garden to see if that gave me some other interesting outcomes. Here is a wheel made of leaves. The blue was tricky until I thought about blue greys, and then I found half a dozen Australian plants with bluish leaves.

Things like packaging and book covers and street signs are great too. Anything that you come into contact with can be put into a colour wheel if you’re looking. Here are a few fun ones I found online, as well as my favourite colour wheel of all time that someone made of the Queen :)

Part of your homework this week is to stretch yourself by making a few more unexpected colour wheels - they can be all the same kind of thing like these, or a mix of different things in your environment.

Try to see things through a slightly different eye this time as you’re looking for things to place in your grouping. Yes, look for things that can make a more traditional colour wheel (like my fruit colours), but also look for things that can make a colour wheel in a slightly different way, like all pastel or all darker colours.

When it come to fabrics, colour can mean not just the solid reality of something like this yellow - 

But also the colours around them that make them read as yellow. Here’s a gradation of yellows I pulled out to bring with me. All these yellows are just grabbed from the top of my stash. You’ll notice the “orange” from my colour wheel above is in there, and here it looks very yellow. 

It lives in the yellow area of my stash, but its a real chameleon that fabric - and so are lots of others. Put it between two very orange fabrics, and its an orange, no debate. Same fabric, same lighting, different influence. 

Here’s another one - and this is one of the most contentious colour debates out there.

When Carol sent in her colour wheel this week, she had taped a bit of aqua fabric to the top corner with the comment - “at first I thought this was green??” To my eye, this fabric is blue. There will be some of you bellowing that it IS green, I know. My husband insists that this aqua situation is green, but for me its solidly blue, and here’s why.

Put it next to a blue fabric - 

Put it next to a green fabric - 

Put the three together.

For me? So blue. Maybe for you though, its green. If the colour was analysed in a colour computer of some kind that told us what percentage of blue and yellow and green was used make that exact shade, we would know for certain, but the real answer here is… shhhhh… 

IT DOESN’T MATTER :)

If I choose to use it with blues and make it a blue, then its a blue. If I choose to use it as a green and make it a green, then that’s what it is. Your eye will see what you tell it to see.

Thats why when I use “GREEN” in a quilt, its never just one green, its 20 or 25 or 30. If I need 1.25 metres of green, that green will be made up of a slew of different fabrics, never just one. I never worry about wether they “go together” or wether they are the “same green”. I choose fabrics that read as green to me when they are together, and that look attractive together. I use blue greens and yellow greens and grey greens and mints all in the one quilt, without ever a moment’s concern, because the rules we all think we have to follow about colour are made to be broken. Colour itself is not something that can be put in a box, it’s something you have to roll around in, play with and not be frightened by, and then its YOURS and you can do whatever the heck you like with it. 

The second part of your homework this week is to choose a fabric you aren’t sure about - a purple-ish or a yellow-ish or whatever you like - and make two different colour stories using that one fabric, like with my yellow or aqua fabric above. For example if you choose an aqua, make a blue story with it and a green story with it. You will find the same will work for a lot of fabrics in your stash, you won’t need to look too hard!

Please take photos of and email me your findings again, it’s fun for everyone else to see how different other interpretations are. Next week we will look at tones and then we can start thinking about what these things all mean to your quilts and how to apply them. If you have any questions you would like me to address, feel free to add them in the comments or email them to me too!

Sarah x

​PS. While I was wandering around the garden picking leaves I met a friend! Isn't he gorgeous? He lives under a rock in the garden but he was going under the house, probably looking for some yummy grubs :) For those of you not in Aus, this is an echidna.