When I first designed the Relativity Quilt, I think I was in search of a quick pattern that kind of rebelled against the modern quilting world. I really wanted somewhat of an art piece that I could hang on my wall. My friends and family quickly fell in love with the design - I think mostly because they could relate to it, as opposed to other quilting patterns. When I first started really drawing in high school, I was somewhat obsessed with M.C. Escher - his work spoke to me in a way I can’t really explain. Over the years my drawing style did not resemble his work in the slightest, though, he was definitely a major influence on this pattern design. I took his ‘stairs to nowhere’ concepts and brought them to life in the form of a bright and colorful quilt. Most of his work is in all black and white but I LOVE color and this is the perfect quilt to show some good old color theory techniques off! Read on for a brief intro on color theory techniques that you can directly apply to your quilting.
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Now Let’s Talk Details…
Picking Out Colors….
Honestly, this may be the most challenging part of this pattern! You can start out by using the B/W filter on your mock-up, coloring sheet, or fabric pull to visualize the different values of your color ideas. Once your photo is in B/W, here are some questions you can ask yourself: Is there a wide range of lights, mediums, and dark tones? Does the pattern still read even though there is no color?
Another tactic you can try is starting out with the basics - do you want warm or cool tones? A combo of both? Monochromatic?
See the image below for the different types of color combos that make a great starting point for any fabric pull!
If you look at the color wheel to the right, I marked the color concepts behind the cover quilt. Since there are a wide array of color tones in this pattern, I chose to stick to a combination of both analogous and complementary (Tetradic ) colors. The warm tones and cool tones are analogous to each other, but are also complementary to each other forming a rectangle on the color wheel. I also made sure that my values were varying across the stripes so that no color got lost and/or jumbled together. This is shown in the B/W version of the quilt - as you can see, you are still able to read the pattern, see the stripes, and even without the color it still looks great.
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