The Quilter's Field Guide to Color by Rachel Hauser

My new favourite book by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color arrived a week or so ago, and gosh, I love it! It’s called The Quilter’s Field Guide to Color and I’ve caught a few moments each day, soaking in the cool insights and beautiful pictures.

Today is my stop on the ‘book hop’ and I’m doing the “all colors in” challenge.

My experience working with colour is usually limited to completely scrappy, or letting a fabric designer do the work for me. Both of these make me happy for different reasons. Scrappy gives me all the happy feelings, and using a single collection is calming and directive. When I put my hand up for “all colours in”, I thought, ‘I’ll go with scrappy, it will be easy and I won’t have to think much so close to the move!’

But then Rachel’s beautiful book arrived and I was (happily) surprised at how different it was to what I was expecting. The first thing I appreciated was that it was light(er) on color theory than on creating the feeling we want with fabric. Just because I learned the colour wheel in high school doesn’t mean I know how to use it to create clashy, scrappy favourites or light and airy gifts. Usually these things happen by intuition, and Rachel has done a really great job of teasing the intuitive side of color play apart to make it more step-by-step.

My first job for this challenge (after cutting the included swatches into separate rectangles,) was to fill in the ‘All In’ colour rainbows with classic colours, pastel, dusty, and jewel. What struck me immediately was that my palette is generally ‘jewel’ in tone. What I thought was randomly scrappy, was still a very specific collection of colours.

I then filled in gaps to make a smooth rainbow. I love how it’s heavy on the teal and purple! Yum!

I then went to my stash (which is packed for our move, but near the ‘box room’ door so I could get back in to rifle through!) and had a little play with different colours. Top left for pastel, bottom left for classic. I really had to dig around for those! The rest are prints I thought fit into other colour stories but probably turn out to be jewel in tone. Maybe the bottom right two are dusty?

I settled on these three for my (imaginary) bear paw block. And no surprises. These are three of my most used fabrics! Unfortunately the Bear Paw won’t make it into existence with my sewing room (ie, the box room) all packed up for our move late next week.

I can’t wait to spend more time with this book, experimenting with other exercises. It really took some will power to cut up those swatches and not just use fabrics instead, but I’m so glad I did. It’s a fun and helpful experience to not be swayed by your favourite prints, and just be looking at colour…Even if you end up back at your favourites in the end!