Color, Fabric and Design. It’s a huge topic that overwhelms many quilters, but it doesn’t have to. Putting together colors, selecting fabrics and pairing them with design is the whole fun of quilting. So come with me to the fabric store and I’ll share my process as I put together fabrics for a piece, and talk about color, contrast, value, fabric and design. Let’s go….

Front of my color wheel showing warm and cool colors, and information about primary, secondary and tertiary colors plus basic definitions of color, hue, value, intensity, tint, tone, shade and neutral gray. It also has a gray scale from black thru to white.

Getting Ready. Helpful Tools

There are many theories of color. I’m not going to get too theoretical or technical on you. However you might find it helpful to buy a good color wheel and a value finder (a red viewer). I don’t take my color wheel with me to the stores, but you could as you are gaining confidence. Mostly, I want to encourage you to experiment, trust your gut, what you like, and have fun playing, like you did when you colored with crayons in coloring books as a kid.

I think playing with color and design is loads of fun, and I thought I would share with you how I approach coloring in a pattern design in hopes that you will find the fun in the process, too.

12 yr. old ***Radiance***, hand sample that needs a face lift.

Know what you are Making

I start with the pattern I’m making. So I’m always thinking about the piece, and making decisions based upon imagining the fabrics in that quilt pattern.

Today I’m looking to give a facelift to Radiance, Medallion V. Most of the time I design in EQ8 (Electric Quilt 8) with digital fabric images from fabric companies. But today I went to a local quilt shop and had fun putting together some combinations for my hand version for a remake with real fabric. Because it’s going to be stitched by hand, I will need to be able to see through the background fabric, at least with a light box, to trace the design.

I find a fabric or two that I really like to start with. I pull them out onto the floor. Then I hunt for what works with them.

To Create Life in a Quilt we need Contrast.

Contrast can be created in several ways. Most of our reverse applique patterns use two fabrics for the design with perhaps a third for the binding. It’s amazing just how important that spot of color in the binding can be. Bigger or pieced quilts obviously use more fabrics.

We can get contrast from value, color and pattern. Pattern encompasses the fabric’s design as well as the pattern’s design. For now let’s not complicate our discussion by introducing fabric design, even though ultimately, fabric design for a particular pattern design is an important element of fabric selection along with value and color contrast.

Look at fabrics in terms of value. Value Finder

a red filter value finder helps to remove color and pattern to help you determine whether a fabric is a light, medium or dark.

Is the fabric a light, a medium or a dark? This is the first way to get contrast. When using two fabrics, the value of one fabric is relative to the value of the other fabrics you are using. This is particularly true of mediums. A medium is a dark next to a light, and a light next to a dark.

But unless you are using solids, fabrics have their own designs, and often more than one color in them, which can muddy your sense of what its value is. Having a value finder, a red filter, to look through at the fabric, can be a useful tool. It can be helpful to take it with you when going fabric shopping. The value finder removes the distraction of fabric design/multiple colors and focuses the eye on the relative lightness or darkness, helping to determine its value. You can get a value finder at most quilt stores or on Amazon.

Contrast with Color

The other way to get contrast is with fabric color. This is a big subject, but for now, here’s a quick look at some basics.

Back of my color wheel showing complementary, split complementary and triad colors, plus shades, tones and tints, with other helpful tid-bits of information.

The simplest, and often most effective, contrasts are the complementary color relationships; those across the color wheel:

Red-Green;
Red/orange-Blue/green;
Orange-Blue;
Yellow/Orange-Blue/Violet
Yellow-Violet;
Red/Violet-Yellow/Green.

These are also opposites in terms of warm vs cool colors(warm colors are listed first in the pairs above). Within each color you have tints, tones and shades of each color that provide further value contrast.

Another approach is using the split complementary colors, which are using any color with the two colors on each side of its complement.

Green with Red/Orange and Red/Violet;
Blue with Yellow/Orange and Red/Orange;
Violet with Yellow/Green and Yellow/Orange;
Red with Blue/Green and Yellow/Green;
Orange with Blue/Violet and Blue/Green;
Yellow with Red/Violet and Blue/Violet.

And yet another approach is the triad, using three colors equally spaced from each other on the wheel.

Yellow, Red and Blue.
Yellow/Green, Blue/Violet and Red/Orange.
Green, Orange and Violet.
Blue/Green, Red/Violet and Yellow/Orange.

There are further relationships, too, but these are the basics. When putting a quilt piece together color relationships are not used in isolation, but a wonderful interplay of several. So let’s begin the fun.

Fabric Selection: Radiance

My Radiance pattern is a circular, swirl pattern that finishes at 26” x 26”. What is black on the pattern is where the background fabric will be peeking out. Conversely, what is white on the pattern will be the top fabric surriounding and framing the design cut-outs.

Though we’re talking more about color in this blog, by time I’m selecting fabrics, I’m also considering the fabric’s design, too, and how it relates to the pattern. I like to use fabrics that have either a design in them that might echo or augment the pattern design in some way, or a flow of color in the fabric itself. This creates dynamic movement to the finished piece. Because this sample will be stitched by hand, I also need to be able to see through the background fabric, at least with a lightbox, in order to trace the pattern when making it.

My daughter Gwen, who’s visiting from England was with me, so I had a companion to play with, which made it extra fun.

I found two fabrics I really liked, so we started creating two different combinations to see which I liked best: one using a medium value snail motif fabric by Batik Textiles, and the other using a light value, multi-colored dots with bursting lines fabric by Island Batik. These are my focus fabrics for each combination.

My process: Fabric Selection

Focus Background Fabric: Choosing a Top Fabric

We started with the light, multi-colored bursting fabric, my focus background fabric. I liked the colorful bursting lines/ dots and could imagine them in the cut out shapes of Radiance shooting out as they peeked out through the top fabric, creating movement. Cueing off the colors in the background fabric..blue, turquoise, yellow, magenta, orange, green…I started pulling bolts off the shelves. I start my auditioning, whether in a store or in EQ8, with what seems obvious “go-with” fabric choices and progress to what may seem ridiculous. But often from trying out-of-the-box ideas, something new opens up, or sets me in a new direction outside of my usual color rut and into new, better combinations. Ideally, I thought, I wanted a multi-print top fabric with movement, too.

I’m not shy about pulling bolts off the shelf. I really need to see the fabric: the wash of colors across it, the pattern of the fabric design, if it has a direction or not, and be able to lay one fabric next to another to see how the fabrics affect each other. Though I take lots of bolts off the shelves, I always put everything back and in their right spots.

I pull a bolt of fabric off the shelf and lay it next to the focus background print and look. I watch to see how they are changed, how they interact with each other. What does the trial bolt do to the focus fabric? Does it brighten it? Make it go flat? Gray it? Does it keep moving or does the movement cease? Does it make a certain color stand out? Etc? This is where subjectivity comes in. Some combinations may work, but does it zing for me? (If you were putting the same fabrics together, you might prefer a different combination. That’s ok. We all see something different.) I wanted to continue to see the vibrant life in the fabric combination that I saw in the focus fabric by itself. Depending on what was laid next to it, that life was either enhanced or dampened. Sometimes a trial fabric/ color worked, but the fabric itself was too boring.. In Radiance, you see a fair amount of the top fabric framing the swirl cut outs, so the interest of the top fabric can be important. Another fabric that worked was very pink but I didn’t think a pink top would draw in customers; a consideration as a business owner. In another combination I rejected, the color was good, but the character of the print stylistically clashed with the background. After auditioning about 40 bolts, I came up with two possible top fabrics to pair with the background; each bringing out something different in the piece.

The bright red/ magenta with its colored dots fabric combined with the bursting focus background fabric on the left is bright and lively and you really see the multi-colored spokes. When looking at the Color wheel, this combination uses the complementary, split complementary and triad color relationships.

The combo on the right, with the blue print top fabric is very interesting viewed closer, but reads calm and very blue overall from a distance. It uses the split complementary, triad and tetrad color relationships from the color wheel. The blue print, though, is a very interesting fabric and encompasses the complementary, split complementary and triad color relationships from the color wheel in itself. Isn’t fabric a marvel? Which combination do you like best?

Focus Top Fabric: Choosing a background fabric

Next Gwen and I worked to create a winning combination using the snail fabric, a medium, as the focus top fabric. I love how the snail swirls mimic the Radiance design swirls.

We tried beiges, tans, ecrus, lt. and medium turquoises, a complementary collection fabric, apricots, corals, peaches, oranges, etc. One by one laying a bolt next to the snail fabric to see what happened to the focus print, we auditioned at least 25 bolts of fabric. Each time looking and asking did it dull it? Did I lose the clarity of the snail swirl in the fabric? What became clear/ what became muddy in the snail design? Did I lose the lt. orange in the fabric? Did it go gray or brown? Did the trial fabric overpower/ overwhelm the focus fabric? Would the overall combination complement or distract from the pattern design?

I took pics with my phone, a useful tool, to see the overall look and to do a side-by-side comparison of combinations. When I play, I look up close and then step back to look at the fabric combinations while imagining the fabrics in the pattern, envisioning what happens to the parts as well as the whole at the same time. In a store I’ll sometimes take fabrics to a window so I can see them in natural light. When designing in EQ8 I’ll print off my designs so I can see them bigger and in print. I always see something different than just looking at a computer screen.

I follow this same process when putting together multiple fabrics for larger quilts. At some point you have to make some tough decisions as to which direction you want to go with your quilt, choosing which fabrics to keep and which to discard.

Winning combination. bold. orange background with Dk. Blue binding.

With input from Gwen I narrowed down my final decisions to two oranges and a medium turquoise as background fabrics to go with the focus snail top fabric, and began to play with bindings to pull it all together. This is where it gets purely subjective: what you like. All these combinations worked. Now it was up to what I liked best. How I envisioned Radiance when it was done. (Gwen preferred another combination.) Each combination did something different to the fabrics and therefore would do something different to the overall impression of the quilted piece.

I loved the blue print fabric but as a binding, and thought it worked best with the med turquoise and lt. orange background fabric combinations. For me the overall winning combination was the bolder orange background fabric with the snail top fabric and the dk. blue for the binding. This combination, when I later checked my color wheel, turns out to be a classic complementary, split complementary use of color.

Prior to going shopping, I had re-designed a machine version of Radiance in EQ8 in Banyan Batiks using their Black and whites. I created at least 30 different variations to come up with this final one that I submitted to the fabric company. Creating a black and white version of the piece is something I’ve always planned since I first started the business. Coming in 2022 will be the first.

Over the years I’ve made several versions of this pattern…the fun of quilting. Each time, something new happens. Most show a sharp value and color contrast. Though not always. There are times where the fabric’s design has provided the contrast. Some of those designs have been riskier, and fabrics need to be chosen more carefully and purposefully. See below to see the past history of Radiance Medallion V quilt pieces so you can learn by what I’ve done: what has worked and not worked so well..

Coming soon, the blog Putting Pattern Design and Fabric Design Together.