Quiltmaker's Color Workshop: The FunQuilts' Guide to Understanding Color and Choosing Fabrics

by Weeks Ringle, Bill Kerr

Whether you're a beginning or experienced quiltmaker, Quiltmaker's Color Workshop will help you use color more creatively in your designs. Through a showcase of more than 35 great quilts, ranging from contemporary to traditional styles, the authors show how colors work together to support a "big idea." Learn to go beyond simple, formulaic color concepts, and instead, have fun exploring color through individual and group activities that will help you see color in a completely new way.

Genres: Quilting, Crafts

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an expanded edition of Color Harmony for Quilts and includes some of the same quilts and information. The authors have design and art degrees and the information is at a more professional level. Color wheels are included with light to dark rings.
The color schemes are interesting as they go beyond the traditional schemes of complementary and analogous. I would like to make the quilt Mod which has 36 blocks with a quarter circle in the corner. The blocks join together to form 9 circles.

[JayeL]

This book gives quiltmakers the tools and techniques for selecting colors. It does not steer you towards the 'accepted' methods of selecting colors, such as the 'focus fabric' method. Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr bring their experience from outside the quilt world to quiltmakers by introducing techniques and methods that quiltmakers are not normally taught. Listening to instrumental music and identifying the colors the reader sees in the music as well as trying to replicate textures in color are two methods discussed. There numerous other suggestions by the authors for methods of selecting a unique palette.

Selecting fabrics is just the start, however.

One of the best things about this book is the definitions. They have definitions of hue and value and color that actually make sense; definitions that the average reader can take away and use.

After the definitions section come the exercises. These exercises are made up of three parts: color variations, individual exercises and group exercises. The pages where Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr display color variations in quilt format gives the reader a practical sense of the use of color. Part of this exercise shows the proportion of color used in a quilt and what happens to the overall look of the quilt when colors are added and removed.

I haven't done any of the individual exercises, but they are quite accessible and one of them (listing all the colors I can think of and then marking my favorites) is quite tempting.

The group exercises, which took me awhile to notice, make me think of a class where, over the course of a period of time, a group could explore color together.

The three parts of this book made me look at colors in a new way this morning after reading several sections.

As with all quilt books, there are projects and patterns. These don't annoy me as much as patterns in other books, because the authors discuss their Big Idea in the course of the pattern.

This is a book that I would encourage people to read and keep near by for easy and frequent referral.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers very helpful tips on how to choose colors for quilts. It teaches through examples, which is nice.