I was afraid of losing my own color style if I learned the color wheel, so for years I resisted. Finally, I gave in, feeling like I didn’t know the “secret handshake” of all those art quilters who kept going on about the color wheel.
Interestingly enough, I didn’t learn it as a quilter, I learned how to use the color wheel when I began taking watercolor painting courses. I had to mix my own colors and it was imperative that I know the colors on the wheel, how they interacted, what made a color dull, what made it intense, and why some colors went together well and others didn’t.
So I took that knowledge I gained in watercolor and applied it to my quilts. And I never did lose my own color style, I simply made the colors I liked work better together. I was no longer afraid of using ANY color in a quilt, because now that I knew the color wheel, I could coordinate any color with any other color. They all go together if you know how to do it.
And you get to learn how. But again, baby steps.
- Download the color wheel I’ve created for you here. Print it out onto card stock or trace it onto posterboard so that it will last. Click here to download.
- The wheel has twelve numbered spaces, just like that of a clock. You are going to cut fabric swatches and glue stick them down onto the wheel. The fabric colors and their placement are as follows:
- Yellow-Orange - 1
- Orange - 2
- Red-Orange - 3
- Red - 4
- Red-Violet - 5
- Violet - 6
- Blue-Violet - 7
- Blue - 8
- Blue-Green - 9
- Green - 10
- Yellow-Green - 11
- Yellow - 12
Don’t fret over perfectly-sized squares or a perfect-looking wheel. The point here is to get the colors down and evaluate what you have in your stash.
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