"Maria holds your hand and builds your color confidence, page by page with her smart tips, clear explanations and easy exercises. Her teaching experience and style are obvious as I felt like I was taking an at-home class just with her. I appreciate having her book on hand as a resource when I need a reference for pulling fabrics together and want to expand my color horizons." —Joan Hawley Lazy Girl Designs, www.LazyGirlDesigns.com
"I’ve attended several lectures on the color wheel, but none of them made me start thinking about color the way that Maria Peagler’s Color Mastery did. All of a sudden I had fresh eyes, and looked at everything around me with greater understanding. This book is an instant classic." —Kay Mackenzie appliqué designer, www.quiltpuppy.com, Easy Appliqué Blocks: 50 Designs in 5 Sizes
"Maria is a gifted teacher who understands your fears and frustrations with quilt color combinations. She does a beautiful job of merging the normally dry process of learning color principles with intuitive exercises that let you relax and play. While Color Mastery doesn’t cover color mixing for painters, it’s really perfect for quilters who use fabrics to create their color imagery. It's packed full of useful charts, illustrations, tips, things to think about, color wheels and harmony patterns." —Susan Shie
www.turtlemoon.com
"Wonderful, thoroughly researched book that unravels the mystery of color with both exercises and projects. Maria’s playful attitude shines through - she’s made the projects and exercises so much fun! This book is a great resource for anyone trying to learn more about color." —Carol Taylor quilt artist and teacher, www.caroltaylorquilts.com
"Come along as Maria Peagler guides you through journaling techniques to find and develop your own color skills. You will fondle fabrics and bond with the color wheel in more ways than you thought possible as the elements of color jump off the pages of this book and into your creative life!" —Marti Michell
quilter, author, teacher, Silver Star Honoree 2004
"A helpful addition to any quilter's library. Color Mastery provides a wealth of advice on making your fabrics' colors work for you. Maria's best advice: keep a color journal to record appealing color combinations, then use color theory to analyze why you like them. Her recommendation to audition potential fabric swatches is a lifesaver - better to sacrifice a few small pieces of fabric than to discover colors aren't working together after you've cut out all the pieces. I especially liked the explanations of which parts of standard color theory only work for paints where the colors are mixed together and which parts are important for designing with fabric." —Martha Sielman Masters: Art Quilts (Lark Books), Executive Director, Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc., http://www.SAQA.com
"As a workshop instructor, I realize that making the right color choices is both a difficult task and a crucial one. Maria voices the struggles and decisions that plague all quiltmakers (whether traditional or contemporary) and shows how to develop color schemes that are not only pleasing, but also rich and satisfying. Maria takes the guesswork out of color choices." —Elizabeth Barton
art quilter, www.elizabethbarton.com
"Are you no good at color?” Spend time with your stash and Color Mastery and become a master! By training your eyes, Maria’s ten principles make working with color intuitive—and fun. Change your attitude about color from fear to play!" —Jodie Davis
President, QNNtv, www.QNNtv.com
"Peagler’s writing voice is friendly and humorous, but she remains focused and professional throughout this guide, resulting in a book that is both highly informative and interesting to read. Her passion for color is contagious, and the exercises are meaningful and fun to do!" —ForeWord magazine
www.foreword.com
"Although the subject is not new, Peagler's writing style makes it so nonthreatening and easy to understand that it actually seems new." —Coast Weekend
coastweekend.com
"Beautifully illustrated with full color photographs and diagrams . . . a no-nonsense guide to developing one's own quilting patterns using the principles of aesthetically pleasing color combinations to maximum effect. From developing one's color vision in a journal to making any two colors work together to creating a more versatile stash and more, Color Mastery spells out the basics as well as advanced tips, tricks, and techniques. . . a top-notch addition to any quilter's reference library.
" —Midwest Book Review
". . . an essential guide for a revolutionary new way of approaching color in your quilts." —NQA Quilting Quarterly
It’s been strange over the past couple of weeks without my color journals. I lovingly packed them off to Quilter’s Newsletter for an excerpt of the book they’re planning for a spring issue. I was hesitant to send them, they are so much a part of me. But I wanted to share the color journal process and its potential with quilters so they could explore their own color styles.
To fill that void, I’ve started a new journal. Still a color journal, but more of a visual journal and business plan in one. I’ve been following the exercises in The Creative Entreprenuer by Lisa Sonora Beam and part of that is to create a mandala that ties together four pathways of business. I was at a local cafe with my journal and supplies and created this.
I doubted the whole visual journal process at first (does this sound familiar to quilters who doubt color journals?). I own plenty of beautiful books on journals, but they all seem to be recycling other people’s art and the makers spend more time creating the pages than getting meaning out of them. But I forged ahead anyway and was pleasantly surprised. This visual journal process works for creative business owners. I really don’t like filling out state tax forms, doing accounting, cash flow projections, and the like, but they are necessary parts of my business. And Lisa’s visual journal process helps creative business people visually map out their strengths, weaknesses, and plans. In a method that speaks to them.
So again, it’s journals to the rescue. For color. For business. For quilts. After all, it’s always about the quilts.
Watch as I give Facebook Fan Annette Franklin a color consultation for the Renaissance quilt. Annette won a one-on-one color consultation, and we went to Dragonfly Quilt Shop in Watkinsville, GA to coordinate her color palette. Annette was really excited because she was able to bust her color rut and go beyond her usual color scheme and try out new fabric styles as well. Over at my Quilts and Creativity blog I’ll be talking about some behind-the-scenes details from producing this video.
Fall 2009’s hottest colors are Mimosa, a yellow-orange selected by Pantone to cheer up consumers in a down economy, and Amethyst, a violet that is showing up everywhere from textiles to apparel to cosmetics. Not only are these colors popular, they work great together in a color palette. Why? How do you use them? Watch this short video and learn how.
Maud shares her Renaissance quilt from the Color Mastery workshop I taught this summer in Dawsonville. My students use their color journals to discover the three elements of color and build unique palettes around their favorite color. Even if quilters start out with the same blue, they’ll develop completely individual color palettes. They truly discover their color personalities.
Last, I have students select one of their color palettes and build a fat quarter bundle from it: one fat quarter for each color. And I teach them how to use the Three Bears Rule of Color to know exactly how much of each color to use. They can use that bundle to make the Renaissance quilt shown here. Maud used a double-complementary color scheme of blue, orange, yellow, and violet, and what gorgeous results she got!
Maud was so inspired by her Renaissance quilt she decide to make a matching valance, and here she’s laying out the fabrics for it. Discovering a new technique sparks the creative juices and gets new ideas flowing, and mastering color gives quilters the courage to try all kinds of new things. Make time for an artist date for yourself and try these exercises. You’ll never look at bolts of fabric the same way!
Debbie and I met at FoxTales Book Shoppe during my book tour, and she is a fantastic lady who was so ready to learn about color in quilting. Debbie read Color Mastery and applied the lessons, and look at her results. Wow. Debbie made this beautiful quilt for her niece Karen.
Debbie has never taken one of my workshops, so she was able to do all this from the book alone. She knew what quilt she wanted to make – a Yellow Brick Road, and she knew she wanted blue as the main color. She used her color journal to figure out what blues to use, and what other colors would give her the effect she wanted with those blues.
Fabrics are cut and ready to be put into a quilt. Debbie’s “artist date” in her color journal paid off big rewards. You can already see the effects of those colors working together. Blues and greens blend nicely, while the yellow and pink sparkle.
Here’s a close up of all those beautiful fabrics together, plus a few more. Debbie is thrilled with her results, and her niece Karen is one lucky girl! Imagine what you can do with your fabrics, a color journal, and Color Mastery!
Try out the Renaissance quilt, one of the nine quilt projects in the book – it takes only 6 fat quarters, shows you how to select your colors, how to decide how much of each color to use, teaches strip-piecing, and has no triangles. Super easy and totally rewarding! In only one day, you can be a color master and have a gorgeous quilt. Send me photos of the projects you make from Color Mastery and I’ll post them here on my blog!
I want my work to last. Longevity is one of the three main goals I have for my books. The other two? A post for another day.
I realized long ago that it took just as long to write a book that was trendy and out of print after two years as it did to write a classic. And as a quilter and artist, I appreciate books that provide me with lessons for years to come.
I often hear people complain about how expensive books are, which is why I go for those that provide me with lasting value. I enjoy patterns, booklets, and other fun diversions. But they don’t have the lasting value of a book.
Color Mastery has nine quilt projects. If you bought them individually in a pattern, each would average $15.00. Multiply that times nine and you get $135.00.
Color Mastery also has 11 exercises, and has twelve months worth of class material. I teach shop owners how they can offer a different class each month using the exercises and projects in the book. A full-day class averages about $60.00, and 12 of them would be $720.00.
$135.00 worth of patterns/projects, and $720.00 worth of classes is a total of $855.00. Still think a book is expensive? Look’s like the world’s best bargain to me.
The real test of a book-lover’s book is this: does it provide those things that make a reader’s life easier, that will make the book last, and makes it easy to find, or get more information? I printed Color Mastery on museum-quality paper using the best photographer and printer in the industry.
I included an index to make information easy to find. Look at the latest quilt book you bought: I bet it doesn’t have one. Publishers are skimping on this kind of stuff and betting you won’t notice. Bibliographies too. I want to know how to find out more information when I’m interested in a topic, and I know my readers do too. And librarians love them.
Does the book’s binding last? Is it sewn or glued? Color Mastery’s is sewn, of course. And it has a spine, so you can find it on a store shelf or your own.
Look for these qualities when you buy a book. Be a discerning consumer. Expect them in your books and ask for them. And support quilt book authors who give you the best.
Over at my Quilts and Creativity blog I just posted photos of the adorable quilt shop I taught at last Saturday: The Stitching Barn in Eatonton, GA, near Lake Oconee. It has great retreat potential, so you won’t want to miss it. Here are some photos from the workshops I taught:
Here we’re doing an exercise with value, and I suggest that my students share fabrics and use the color they have in abundance. Each of the three separate tables had the most fabric in what color?
Green.
Me too. What about you? Greens are in abundant supply in most shops and in nature. When I organized my fabric stash by color, I was really surprised by what colors I had in plenty and what I was missing. My shelves were full of red and green, but I didn’t have much in the way of blue, and I love blue!
And here’s my class photo from my Color Mastery workshop the last weekend in May at my hone shop, Sew Memorable:
Maude, Sharon, Barbara, and Dixie are showing off their fat quarter bundles they coordinated themselves from an exercise we do in the class. It’s an enormous leap for quilters to go from a printed color wheel to actually putting together their own color palettes in fabric, and these ladies did a tremendous job!
I’m excited and humbled to announce Color Mastery is already in a second printing. Color Mastery so rocked the quilting world we are going to another print run only three months after its February 2009 debut. That’s unheard of. Most authors never have a book reach a second printing, even after years on the bookstore shelves. This is my eighth book and the first one to make a second print run.
You can read more about it here. After that, get quilting! A suggestion? Make the Renaissance quilt from Color Mastery. Add a border and it makes a great summer throw. Or make it in a table runner size in your favorite light and airy summer fabrics.
I’ve been gone so long during my book tour and at spring Quilt Market I wasn’t able to upload a May video, so here are two new videos: one for May and one for June. My goal is to do one video a month on color, and this month I answer the #1 question asked of me during my book tour and give you guidance on how to use the new 20 hot colors forecasted for quilters.
New Colors for 2009/2010
Quilter’s Newsletter June/July 2009 issue has an article on p. 37 (how’s that for specific!) by Luana Rubin, president of online fabric retailer eQuilter, in which Ms. Rubin forecasts the top 20 hot colors for quilters. She puts them together in a 5×4 grid, so that any two-block color combination makes a trendy color palette. Enjoy the video and the guidance it brings on actually putting these new hues to use in your quilts. Download the chart listing the new colors here.
Using Prints in a Color Palette
This video answers the most-often asked question I received during my April/May book tour. In fact, at every stop a quilter had this question. I had no idea prints were so challenging to people, and I’m delighted I was able to connect with my readers long enough for us to really have a discussion about color. In my classes students often bring fabrics that “read as solids,” and avoid busy prints altogether. Here I offer a solution for coordinating your favorite prints, whether large-scale, small-scale, contemporary or reproduction, in to a color palette for your quilt.
Good news for quilt shop teachers and owners: Color Mastery lesson plans are now available on this website! Click here to download or look under the Quick Links section of the sidebar for the Lesson Plan link. Included in the lesson plans are:
list of twelve months of classes from Color Mastery
lesson plan for each class, including supplies needed, class length, and teaching tips
kit suggestions (including supplies and fabric amounts) for classes
top ten ways Color Mastery boosts profits for quilt shops
top ten ways for students to be innovative in their color palettes
These lesson plans should make class preparation easy for teachers and give them invaluable insight into teaching color classes in a shop environment. If there’s something you’d like to see added, please let me know and I’ll be happy to include it.
