Thanks so much for hanging out with me. It's so much fun seeing what y'all come up with! Everyone else, time to join in--it really is a lot of fun and it's a good excuse to pet fabric for awhile. Plus, I'm finding fabric I'd forgotten I had, and I don't even have that big a stash!
This week was a little tougher for me. I didn't come up with any combinations out of my stash that I thought would actually work in a quilt that I'd want to make. This is a color harmony that, if I should choose to use it, would make me take a road trip to my LQS, color wheel in hand.
This is also one in which it really did make a difference which version of the color wheel you're using--the standard 12-point one that we're mostly all used to using (see below), or the Ives/CMYK wheel with 24 points (pictured left): Notice how many more colors the Ives wheel--used here in the Joen Wolfrom 3-in-1 color tool--gives you to work with. More about that below.
This week: Five side-by-side colors.
Or, analogous on steroids.Technically, Color Magic for Quilters points out, this would be called an extended analogous color harmony.
I have a mug with an illustration from the original Winnie the Pooh books and the caption, "I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me."
Fivesies it is.
Color Magic suggests that this color scheme is successful for the same reason that the standard analogous scheme is successful--the five colors all have a common root color with each color to either side, so they flow naturally from one to the next.
Depending on where you start on the wheel, you could have all warm colors, all cool colors, or a mix. However, because it moves step-by-step from warm to cool (or vice versa), it's not quite as shocking a color harmony as those that hop directly across the color wheel for an accent. It would still have a little of that feel to it, but it would be a little more of a peaceful transition.
Play time.
I struggled mightily with this one, like I said above.
Issue #1: What the 3-in-1 color tool defines as purple sure looks like what I've always thought of as red-purple! Regardless of what it's named, though, I worked with the swatches on the tool itself, holding it up to my stash to find the fabrics that seemed to work best.
Issue #2: Using a 24-point color wheel means that your five colors are much closer together in nature than when you're using a 12-point color wheel. So it's harder to feel like there's much of an accent in there. It's still possible to go cool and warm, but it's going to be less of a transition from color to color.
Believe it or not, every fabric there really does match one of the swatches on each card--lighter or darker in tone/shade. I'd never make that quilt, though--which goes to show (as everyone knows) it's not just a matter of matching swatches. You really have to figure out which ones play nice together.
I bagged the purple thing--don't have enough of those five colors in my stash to find anything that was going to work.
Starting with green, and switching to the other standard 12-point color wheel, I worked my way around to orange. This was more successful, although I wasn't a fan of the dark dark green on the end.
(Technical difficulties--can't get the picture to stay rotated in position when I upload it. Sorry about that, but you can see what you need to see so hopefully the odd perspective doesn't make you woozy.)
I swapped out a couple of the greens and tried again. This one is more successful although, if I were a stickler about it, the one green has blue dots, which aren't part of this color harmony. And I still wouldn't make a quilt out of this combination. (Again, it won't rotate. Blogger is giving me fits today!)
So, your turn. Here's hoping you do a lot better than I did with this one! Can you do five side-by-side colors, or fivesies, from your stash?
