Hey Everyone, welcome back to Stash Blasting Wednesday.

As kids we were always asking everyone what is your favourite colour? What was your answer? Mine was always blue.

I know that I have colours that I am definitely drawn to and love to work with like cool colours and bold, bright colours.

There are also colours that I am not drawn to as much, but still use in my quilting just maybe not quite to the degree of the ones that I am drawn to.

On Monday I ran my colour class for a few ladies here in my studio and we had a great time talking about colour, creating a colour wheel from a bin of scraps that sits under my sewing table and making a gradated monochromatic fabric runs from light to dark.

The bin of scraps

These ladies in the class are experienced quilters but no matter how experienced you are there is always something to learn about colour.

We talked about the colour wheel and all the colour schemes or combinations that it creates. In fact we even made a colour wheel from the scraps. The photo at the top of the page shows one in progress.

The schemes on the colour wheel

My favourite colour schemes are the complementary ones which is evidenced by how many quilts I have made from this scheme but I also like triadic and tetradic and achromatic and analogous and you get the drift.

Then there’s the monochromatic scheme – one colour family from light to dark usually built off a colour run.

Monochromatic colour scheme

Each student made up a colour run from my stash in a certain colour and we took photos, converted them to black and white and juggled fabrics around until we were happy with the result. A great exercise to do to learn all about value.

Here’s one run in blue – this is the first run at the fabrics. – they were then tweaked by removing some and adding new.

A run of blue

Here they are in grey scale to see what the value of each is – once the value was determined the run was tweaked by removing some and adding more.

Fabrics in grey scale

Needless to say everyone went away a little bit wiser about colour and why things work while others don’t. To learn more about colour check out my Colourful Friday blog posts or book a workshop.

It was definitely a fun day surrounded by every colour under the rainbow. (yes, I have a huge stash with every colour and more from under the rainbow)

Happy Quilting!