Hello there StitchyMites I hope you’re all well! I’m still camping out away from home, and I’ll still be here next week too by the looks of things. And the week after that I’ll be off to Sisters for Quilter’s Affair! Life is a little messy at the moment, but we always muddle through don’t we. Sometimes having your regular routine disrupted is a good thing, I think for example my colour wheels and insights have been different not having access to my full and very extensive stash?
Maybe I have looked at things with a different eye, being in the countryside and not at the beach.
Next week we are going to look at some of the questions I’ve been sent from you guys - including
*How to photograph fabrics well
*How to use fabric collections when the colours are so collection specific
Make sure and let me know if you have anything you want to talk about. After that we’re going to start a project using some of the things we’ve learned… there will be a bunch of options for you to make something large or small, so don’t worry too much about volumes of fabric yet.
From last week’s homework, here are some fun “colour wheels” from Petra and Anna Marie!
They both also sent me their fabrics they weren’t sure about. Particularly interesting is Petra’s greyish check - you can see that it leans to grey and black, but also to blues. Fabrics like this can be hard to classify in your stash, but they’re also very useful because they bridge lots of different categories.
This week we are talking about tone and value. A tone indicates the lightness or darkness of a colour, which is most often achieved by adding white, black or grey. The tonal value is increased when you add white or light grey, known as adding a tint. The tonal value is decreased when you add dark grey or black, known as adding a shade.
While we’re at it, we can also talk about hue. Hue is a term used to determine a colour’s position on the colour wheel, but also to talk about the temperature of a colour, for example a warm yellow or a cool green.
So why are we talking about all this? Learning about colour through value, hue, tone, shade and tint can help you to understand how colours relate to each other, and why its OK to mix them all up. Hopefully when we start to make things using our findings in the next few weeks, you will feel a little more confident with your choices and not second guess yourself.
Your homework for this week is to go into your stash and grab a handful of fabric. It can be all different colours and sizes of print. I want you to just grab it all without even looking to see what you got. Make sure you have at least 10 or so different fabrics. No picking and choosing!
Once you have it, try putting it in order from lightest fabric to darkest using just your naked eye. You might find this easy or difficult, depending on what fabrics you have! Once you think you have it all right, take a photo of the order you had them in using your phone.
If you have a value finder tool, you can use it for this next part. A value finder tool is a piece of dark red acrylic, usually a square or a rectangle. When you hold it over your fabric selection, it will reduce the colours to tones for you and make it much easier to determine their value. If you don’t have one of these and would like one, I’m having some made by my template peeps as we speak and I’ll pop them up on the website in the next few days!
If you don’t have one, look at the photo you took with your phone and see if you can see anything that wants changing. Now change the photo to black and white - does it make a difference? If it does, move things around and then take a second photo (in colour) of the changes you made. You might be very surprised by how things look when you take colour from the equation and just look at hue and value. Once you’re done, email both photos to me!
Have fun peeps, please let me know in the comments if you’re enjoying the colour experiments, or if you have any questions or topics you would like me to address. Happy week to all
Sarah x
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