Inspiration: Quilter's Color Quest
The world is bursting with inspiration and you are full of fantastic palettes just waiting to happen.
Let’s practice finding and following inspiration via Experiment 12 in my book, The Quilter’s Field Guide to Color: A Hands-on Workbook for Mastering Fabric Selection.
All artists find inspiration in the world around them. What inspires you? As we continue on Quilter’s Color Quest this chapter explores how you can gather and develop inspiration sources so that the art around you becomes part of your own song.
Sources for inspiration are endless, but I focus on a few popular sources: fabric, other people’s sewn projects, photographs, the arts and fabric designers.
In this chapter, which begins on page 82, you’ll also find an example of a blogger’s image that inspired me years ago and the fabric pull I developed in response. There wasn’t room to print the quilt that emerged from that inspiration in the book, so I thought you might be curious to see my Jade Princess Dogwood quilt. As I remarked about that quilt, in 2013, “Quilting from images is very grounding, creating helpful boundaries and ongoing inspiration. I'm sure I'll do it again! “
Inspiration can come at the wildest times. Be ready to catch it! One instance that comes to mind resulted in a quilt for my young niece several years ago.
That December our family went to see the Nutcracker ballet. During the Waltz of the Flowers scene my heart fairly floated away watching all the colors swirl about. The flower dancers had vivid emerald green bodices paired with skirts in a contrasting hue. Amongst an emerald and bright pink set, the flowers waltzed: pale blue, magenta, butter yellow, turquoise, soft pink, vivid blue. I drank it in. Arriving home late that night, I tucked the littles into bed and scurried to my fabrics, anxious to capture those colors before they faded!
I used a fabric swatch card, all cut up, to represent the colors in my mind and then turned those into a little fabric pull from my stash.
When inspiration strikes, it can be so clear and invigorating that you don’t think you could possible forget. But you can! I encourage you to use your color swatch library from the book to record your ideas as soon as possible. Need to save that idea for later? Take a photo.
The inspiration for the color palette came from Waltz of the Flowers and, after a little time, so did the inspiration for choice of patchwork pattern. I used the Gathering Flowers quilt pattern by Anna Maria Horner, whose fancy, swirly vibe synchronized with the dancers in my memory.
So satisfying!
Take the Challenge
The swatch challenge on pg 89 prompts you to zero in on one particular inspiration source and develop a color palette from that source. Pay especial attention to prominent colors. Often certain colors must be emphasized, with more than one representative swatch or fabric, in order to communicate the color vibe that has captured your heart.
As it turns out, the Waltz of the Flowers inspiration is quite well suited to the vibrant Kona fern background I’m using for these Patchwork challenges. I decided to develop a few blocks that express that color palette. Here are my new “dancers”!
This week, do one or both challenges for Inspiration. Share a photo of your results on Instagram with #QuiltersColorQuest and #QuiltersFieldGuidetoColor. Each month I’ll be drawing one random winner from those who use the Color Quest hashtag. Each photo is a chance to win fabric!
