52 Quiltmaker • May/June ’16

You’ll find an infinite assortment of color ideas online. Use sites like Pinterest, Instagram and flickr to look for inspiration. The search features are helpful. Try searching Pinterest for something like “pink and green quilt” and see what hap-pens.

You can use Google for color inspi-ration, too. When you arrive at google.com, look near the top for a horizontal row of options and select “Images.” Type in the search terms, such as “blue and orange quilts” (no quotation marks needed). Thousands of images fitting your search will appear. Be warned: You may spend hours looking!

Diane Harris is Associate Editor for Quiltmaker.

If fabric and thread are a quilt’s skin and bones, then color has to be a quilt’s soul. Quilt after quilt would be as lifeless as a corpse without the reflections of light we recognize as color.

If you’re making a quilt from a pat-tern, you can always reproduce the colors shown. But what happens if you want to change it up? How do you proceed? Where do you find the inspiration to choose unique, attractive and successful color com-binations for your projects?

The answers are right in front of you. You need only learn how to spot them, record them, talk about them and use them for yourself.

Color for Quilters: Finding Inspirationby Diane Harris

Become an observer. Practice notic-ing the colors in your world. When you’re outdoors, pay attention to the palettes of nature. I’ve pulled off the road more than once to snap a photo of the astounding array of greens and yellows in a ditch. Notice the sky, especially early and late in the day. What’s the strange hue that creeps into the air just before a thunderstorm? These are all opportunities to notice color in a new way.

Indoors, notice color in the printed material you consume. Catalogs, calendars, greeting cards, advertise-ments and magazines contain inter-esting color combinations. Look at garment fabrics, too. And here’s a little secret: Banks and hotels use the most fabulous prints and stripes on upholstered furniture—look and see if you can’t spot some color reci-pes you’d use for quilts.

Blushing Buds by Theresa Eisinger and Peg Sprad-lin, Quiltmaker May/June ’15 (No 163). How would you describe these colors? Can you identify what makes them so successful?

Family of Three by Lorna McMahon, Quiltmaker Jan/Feb ’16 (No. 167). Imagine the difference if this quilt’s back-ground was a neutral. The aqua serves to emphasize the giraffes.

Quiltmaker #169 quiltmaker.com 53

Record your observations. A lot of your looking will fall by the wayside unless you start writing down what you see and admire. Make notes about the photos you shoot, the images you love and the quilts that make your mouth water. Whenever it’s possible, save the images to an inspiration notebook. Keep hard copies or take phone photos to preserve them. Online, right-click becomes your best friend. I recently got a Polaroid camera for instant color keepsakes.

Develop your own color language. Here’s what I mean. One spring I went shopping at the mall. The win-dow displays at a popular store were a combination of colors I loved. I wrote down “sage, salmon and Williamsburg blue.” I could recreate this recipe later because I had fixed in my mind exactly what colors I meant by using those words. Even if nobody else knows what you mean by “Alice’s pink bathroom,” if you know what you mean, you can find fabrics in that specific shade of pink when you want to use it.

Other people’s quilts can be a continual source of inspiration. I sometimes buy a quilt pattern or a magazine just because I love the colors in a quilt. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and since you can’t copyright a color scheme, it’s perfectly okay to borrow from what has worked for someone else. There is plenty of color inspiration in Quiltmaker’s 100 Blocks, so take a look at those issues, where top designers have gone all out with powerful color ideas.

When you come across a quilt or a block you love, learn to say why you find it attractive. Is it the com-bination of colors? Maybe it’s the background and the way it sets off the rest of the fabrics. Could it be the brightness or muddiness of the fabrics? Do the colors shout with excitement, or do they say, “Sit down and put your feet up”? Being able to identify exactly what you admire will help you to use the col-ors more authentically for yourself.

It’s also possible that the colors aren’t what you like at all. In that case, figure out what is calling to you and make a note of it. Your col-lection of observations becomes a roadmap to your creativity. What a treasure.

There is one color tool on the mar-ket that I couldn’t live without. The Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool from C&T Publishing has consistently gotten me out of color quandaries. I’ve learned a great deal by using this tool over time, and I highly rec-ommend that you get one. I wrote about one way I use the tool on Quilty Pleasures; find that post at quiltmaker.com/colortools.

Another resource I’m loving is The Quilter’s Practical Guide to Color by Becky Goldsmith, also from C&T. It’s not about color theory so much as it is a handbook for quilters who want to understand how fabric behaves in their quilts. Years of experience have given Goldsmith valuable insights, and she shares them in a way quilters can understand and use.

Everyone sees and uses color differ-ently. There are no right or wrong color combinations, but there are more and less successful recipes. Use these practices to become the captain of your own color ship, and then steer it where you will.

Scarlet Spin by Diane Harris, Quiltmaker Jan/Feb ’14 (No. 155). This quilt was inspired by the Infinite Variety exhibit of 650 red and white quilts in New York City in 2011.

Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool by Joen Wolfrom for C&T Publishing, $18.95, ctpub.com

Record your color observations in a journal you can refer to often.