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.