Now that you are training your eye to see color more observantly and have started keeping a color journal, you’re ready to start creating color palettes with your fabric.
- Select one of the magazine photos with colors you absolutely love and can’t wait to work with.
- Identify the major colors in that photo.
- Go to your stash, and select the fabrics that most closely match those in the photo. You’ll need to audition several fabrics before you get a close color match, so don’t be discouraged if this takes a while.
- Cut fabric swatches for each color in the photo and glue them down to a page in your journal. How do those colors look together? Do they look as stunning as in the photo? If not, ask yourself why? Are your colors lighter, darker, less intense? Try again to match closely the colors in the photo.
Extra Credit: Try variations on single swatches of fabric for each color in your palette. Look for a fabric in your stash that has all the colors from that photo. Or create a more complex and rich color palette by selecting multiple fabrics for each color in the photo, with a wider range of values, from light to dark.
You’ve just experimented with color without committing to a quilt yet! Who wants to spend all that time cutting, piecing and quilting to find out afterwards you really didn’t like those colors after all? Life is way too short!
Now you can decide if you enjoy these colors enough to use them in an entire quilt, if you want to tweak the colors a bit more in your journal, or if it’s time to move on to another color palette.
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