Proportions of Color

With the second mini-bundle of our Rainbow’s End Grand Bundle coming out this week as part of our web special, it seemed a good time to talk about how the proportions of colors used can dramatically affect the overall image of the quilt.

When you look at a palette of colors you might say to yourself that you do not like it because there’s too much of this color and not enough of that. But keep in mind that you’re seeing equal amounts of each color. And how your quilt appears will depend on the amount of each color that you use. So I decided to illustrate this with one of my designs, a long time favorite, Night and Day.

 

 

I created Night and Day several years ago and it is a perfect design to experiment with. The original design was based two different of sets of strips with seven fabrics in each set. The colors shaded within each set from light to dark. I wanted to use more fabrics for the Rainbow’s End version so I created four different strip sets shading from light to dark instead of two as in the original. This new version has 28 of the 35 fabrics in the complete Rainbow’s End Grand Bundle.

 

 

The idea of a Day and a Night quilt came about after cutting identical triangles from each strip set. The leftover triangles didn’t get used. The triangles cut from one side of the strip set had larger pieces of the lighter fabrics than those cut from the other side which had more of the darker fabrics. So from just these four strip sets, I created one quilt with the lighter triangles and a second one with the leftover darker ones.

 

 

I deliberately put a light background on Day  and a dark one on Night, as shown above, but look how different the quilts look where I swap borders and background.

 

 

To make these quilts, you will need either the 1/2 yard or full yard bundle. Next time I will show you more background possibilities and I will also have the new revised Night and Day pattern ready for you to download.