I have also been reading Ringle and Kerr’s Quiltmaker’s Color Workshop: The FunQuilts’ Guide to Understanding Color and Choosing Fabrics. I especially got into the text yesterday morning before I got up. I haven’t completely finished the book, but here is my review, such that it is. When I update it, it will be updated here.
Quiltmaker’s Color Workshop: The FunQuilts’ Guide to Understanding Color and Choosing Fabrics by Weeks Ringle
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book gives quiltmakers points and tools for selecting colors. It does not steer you towards the accepted methods of selecting colors, such as the ‘focus fabric’ method. Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr bring their experience from outside the quilt world to quiltmakers by introducing techniques and methods that quiltmakers are not normally taught. Lstening to instrumental music and identifying the colors the reader sees in it as well as trying to replicate textures in color are two methods discussed. There numerous other suggestions by the authors for methods of selecting a unique palette.
Selecting fabrics is just the start, however.
One of the best things about this book is the definitions. They have definitions of hue and value and color that actually make sense; definitions that the average reader can take away and use.
After the definitions section come the exercises. These exercises are made up of three parts: color variations, individual exercises and group exercises. The pages where Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr display color variations in quilt format gives the reader a practical sense of the use of color. Part of this exercise shows the proportion of color used in a quilt and what happens to the overall look of the quilt when colors are added and removed.
I haven’t done any of the individual exercises, but they are quite accessible and one of them (listing all the colors I can think of and then marking my favorites) is quite tempting.
The group exercises, which took me awhile to notice, make me think of a class where, over the course of a period of time, a group could explore color together.
The three parts of this book made me look at colors in a new way this morning after reading several sections.
As with all quilt books, there are projects and patterns. These don’t annoy me as much as patterns in other books, because the authors discuss their Big Idea in the course of the pattern.
This is a book that I would encourage people to read and keep near by for easy and frequent referral.
