Adventures in Paper Piecing & Design by Sarah Elizabeth Sharp

Author:Sarah Elizabeth Sharp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C&T Publishing

MY APPROACH TO

Fabric, Color, and Design

If the color-order nature of this book hasn’t yet given it away, I have a thing for analogous color schemes. That tendency to take the long way around the color wheel often plays out in my designs. But that ring of color isn’t my only guide in the design process!

Fabric Selection

Whether you’re pulling fabric from the shelves of your own stash or your local quilt shop—or some combination of the two—you’ve got to narrow down the universe of infinite color combinations somehow. Amy Butler once said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that no two people see color in exactly the same way. That rings true for me, and I wholeheartedly believe you should embrace that unique perspective—because if not you, then who? Color is subjective and personal, and I really encourage you to explore what combinations intrigue and attract your eye. For me, it’s almost always neutrals plus an analogous set of colors. That’s just my aesthetic; it’s color in a way that makes sense to me.

Which analogous colors, however, tends to be guided by a design’s end function. Am I creating something using a specific fabric collection, where the initial universe is necessarily limited to a couple dozen options? Is it a quilt for someone who happens to love electric green and teal? (That would be me!) Or is it for a room with a fairly well-established palette? On the flip side, maybe I’m starting with a totally blank canvas. If it’s the latter, I like to turn to my favorite color-palette resources.

DESIGN SEEDS

Design Seeds (design-seeds.com) is a color blog that boasts countless premade palettes inspired by photographs from across the globe. Plus, it’s got a very user-friendly interface: Search by color, season, or collection to find stored palettes to kick-start your next fabric pull.

PALETTE BUILDER

My brilliant friend Anne is the mastermind behind Palette Builder (play-crafts.com/blog/palettebuilder2/), a gadget that lets you build a totally personalized palette by pulling colors from your own uploaded images. As an added bonus, Anne’s program outputs the names of coordinating solids (Kona Cotton solids and Moda’s Bella Solids as of the date of this writing) and Aurifil threads, too.

Tip

FABRIC TYPE

I generally love all cottons equally and use a variety of substrates throughout my work; however, some fabrics are better suited to certain designs than others. For instance, lighter-weight fabrics (poplins, lawns, and some shot cottons) can help reduce bulk in complex designs with numerous small pieces and overlapping seams.

How It All Comes Together

My fabric-placement process is a lot like painting—except my palette is an old library reading table, which happens to be in our dining room (love you, hon). Once I have some sort of direction (for example, a palette or decor-driven color story), I’ll gather whatever fabrics I want to use and start organizing them. This is where our dining room table comes in handy. Generally, I prefer to organize my fabrics by color and then value.

Tip

VALUE?

Value is the relative lightness or darkness of a given color. For an

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