Color Theory with Trish Stuart

As I mentioned before, I decided to join my area quilt guild this year to meet more Quilty friends. The January meeting of the Quilt Guild of Plano had over 90 people in attendance! That was super cool! Here are some photos from the meeting.

This is the 2017 Plano Quilt Show quilt on display.

The guest speaker this month was Trish Stuart. She spoke on Color Theory for quilting projects. What a fun person she is! She is originally from Alaska and transplanted here in Texas.

She spoke about the process of separating your chosen fabrics for a quilting project into a value gradation from lightest to darkest and separating the gradation into sections to form the number of values needed for your pattern. For instance if you have a pattern that calls for 4 different values, you would divide your gradation by 4 sections in the same order they are laid in. It doesn't matter how many different patterns of fabric you selected as long as they are in the gradation from light to dark. 

To further illustrate what she means, I'll attempt to break it down further. Say you are using a jelly roll or a bali pop set for a pattern that calls for 4 values. Let's say that there are 20 different patterns of fabric strips in the set. You would lay them down in a gradation based on value from light to dark. Then, your light value section would contain the first 5 patterns in the gradation. The 2nd value section would contain the next 5 patterns. The 3rd value section would contain the next 5 patterns, and the dark value section would contain the last 5 patterns in the gradation. Hope that makes it clearer than mud for ya!

The tricky part is determining which order to place your fabrics into the gradation by value and not color. One thing you can do to help is get those fancy new red or green glasses at your quilt shop used to see value instead of color. If that's not in the cards for you, try looking at your fabrics in low light in comparison to each other.

Here are some photos of her work. Some really demonstrated her use of the value gradation method she spoke about.

 

During her engagement with our guild this weekend, she is teaching 2 workshops for guild members. The first is on Free Motion Quilting and I am unable to attend that one. The second is Curves Made Easy which features this fabulous Poppy quilt. I will post photos and details following the class.

Planning a New Year

Each new year gives us a fresh opportunity to start something new or go in new directions. This year, my plan will include sharing my quilting journey with the world. If fabric, thread, bright colors and creative projects make me happy, I should share it with others. I have lots of unfinished projects that I want to complete and hopefully the commitment to posting projects will keep me committed to completing them.

I have lots of upcoming ventures to share with everyone. First of all, I just recently joined my local quilt guild, Quilt Guild of Plano. I will be attending my first membership meeting this week which I will share. I'm excited to meet some new quilty friends to share my passion with. We have small groups that will meet monthly so I can build some relationships with other quilt enthusiasts. I also got in on attending the annual quilt guild retreat in February. Attendance has been full all year, but there was a cancellation which I am taking advantage of. Yippee! I'll be sure to post about the retreat and share my fun with you.

Currently, I have a small project in the works for one of my super good friends and sorority sister, Amy! She's been such a great friend through some tough times for me and I want to make something special to let her know how much she means to me. Amy's a huge Disney fan so I'm making her an adorable Disney goodie! I hope she likes it. I bought this collection of fat quarters a while back in hopes of making something fun for her, but it took me forever to decide what to make. I finally settled on making a pillow with a fun fringy binding. I was inspired by the fringe trim I found at my local quilt shop which they featured on a fun pillow. Alas, my "aha" moment occurred!

My husband bought me an Accuquilt Go! fabric cutter and dies for our anniversary and I hadn't used it yet. So, I had to break that thing in and see what I could do with it. I selected my hexagon and matching equilateral triangle dies for this project. Hexagons are very trendy right now and featured in all my inspirational project magazines and books so I was dying to give it a go.