A Little About Color

When I take a quilt class, I don’t always buy the kit that comes with the class. The kit is often made up of the same colors and fabric that the instructor uses for her sample. I like using the fabric I have in my stash. What surprises me is the reaction of the other students in the class when they see me using other fabric and colors. They always want to know how I chose the items I did. I usually answer with the truth, I just take the picture of the item we are sewing and match it to the fabric I already have. And at other times, I tell them I just choose the colors I like.

For some people choosing colors is really difficult. They are always so afraid of matching the wrong colors. But really there are no wrong color matches. All the colors go together with every other color. Just look at nature. Every color you can imagine is in nature and often right next to each other. But some quilters and artists think that certain colors must go together.

  But when we look at a color wheel, we see that any color can go with any other color. What a lot of people call color theory, starts with the primary colors which are blue, red and yellow. These are the colors that all other colors come from in certain combinations.

If you take red and yellow and mix them together you get orange. Blue and red combined produce purple and yellow and blue make green. These three colors (orange, purple and green) are secondary colors. Now this is often when some people stray. To some quilters there are just some colors you shouldn’t use like orange. Yeah you could use a burnt orange in an autumn quilt or a peachy orange in a baby quilt but you just don’t use the orange that was in your box of crayons as a child. Why? You will be told it just doesn’t go together with anything.

But actually it does. Orange and a lot of other colors go together just fine. This is due to what is called complementary colors. These are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. Probably the most popular complementary colors are red and greem (popular due to the Christmas holiday). Now if we look at the orange I mentioned, it is opposite blue on the color wheel. The last complementary colors on our little color wheel is purple and yellow.

Now I don’t use these complementary colors in equal amounts. I often use just a little of one color which actually makes it stand out. One quilt I made was purple with just a little squares of yellow. There wasn’t a lot of it but you noticed the yellow because it just appeared every so often over the surface of the quilt.

For me the true rule of color is if you like it, use it. If you like purple and orange even though they are not truly complementary colors, use it. (If you think about it there are more purple and orange Halloween fabrics showing up on fabric shelves in the Fall.) If you like it, it will look good to you and who cares what others say.

  ©2020 Cheryl Fillion