Welcome to Day Three of my Social Media Scavenger Hunt to celebrate Color Mastery being a Benjamin Franklin award finalist for Best Craft Book of the Year.  If you missed Days One & Two, no worries:   I’ll have links at the bottom of this post to direct you to the rules and the each day’s clue.

Look for the answer to clues in my social media channels here:

• Quilts & Creativity blog (my personal blog)
• Monthly newsletter (archives here; sign up to receive it here)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

I’ll be awarding a prize pack that includes a Liberty fat quarter bundle (just in time for those July 4th projects), a Love Apple table runner kit, and a copy of my new ebook, The Frugal Fabriholic:  Your 12-Step Plan to Saving More Cash for Your Quilting Stash.

Day Three Question:  What was I doing in my studio today?

Find the answer, collect them for each day, and once you’ve got all five, email your answers to me at maria @ colormastery.com (minus the spaces).  Good luck!  Here are the links if you missed them for each day:

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Look for the answer to each day’s clue in my social media channels here:

• Quilts & Creativity blog (my personal blog)
• Monthly newsletter (archives here; sign up to receive it here)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

I’ll be awarding a prize pack that includes a Liberty fat quarter bundle (just in time for those July 4th projects), a Love Apple table runner kit, and a copy of my new ebook, The Frugal Fabriholic:  Your 12-Step Plan to Saving More Cash for Your Quilting Stash.

Day Two Question:  Where do I share my famous Cheeseburger Meatloaf recipe?

Find the answer, collect them for each day, and once you’ve got all five, email your answers to me at maria @ colormastery.com (minus the spaces).  Good luck!  Here are the links if you missed them for each day:

Day One

Day Two

Welcome to the first of four contests I’ll be holding here at the Color Mastery blog to celebrate being selected as a finalist for Best Craft Book of 2009 in the Ben Franklin awards.  I’m starting off with an easy-peasy contest for week one, and you won’t believe what I’ve got in store for Weeks 2 & 3!!

I’m an independent publisher:  basically, I’m a solopreneur who has a team of dedicated professionals I rely on to create beautiful books.  I don’t have the big advertising budgets of larger publishers, so I don’t do a lot of advertising, direct mail, or other expensive forms of promotion.  I rely on the best and most trusted way of promoting:  word-of-mouth.

I need your help.  Will you help me spread the word about Color Mastery’s finalist status for Best Craft Book of the Year?  Not only is it a fabulous book, but I’ve provided a wealth of fantastic resources here at the website to extend and support the lessons in the book.  So let’s get the word out!

Here’s what you do:

• spread the word to your quilting buddies online and let me know about it either by leaving a comment here on my blog or on my Facebook Fan page.  I respect everyone’s privacy, so I don’t need first & last names, just let me know “I emailed by guild program chairman” or “I suggested my quilting bee do a an author chat” or even “I spread the word about your newsletter to my sister.”

Here’s what I do:

• select a winner from all of the entries late Friday so you Pacific Time quilters can join in the fun, and I’ll announce the winner on Monday.

What will you win?  Well, I’m thinking something big.  Something really big.  So how about a jelly roll in a Wildflower color palette (fabrics personally coordinated by me), a Love Apple table runner kit, and a set of my watercolor notecards? That’s over $75 worth of prizes, just for shouting out the good news about Color Mastery.  Oh, and that colorful fabric goodness peeking out from the behind the prizes?  That’s May’s Color-of-the-Month table runner, which is running a bit late due to all the festivities.

Are you ready?

Set?

Go!  Spread the word!

Other videos you might be interested in:

• Color Palettes from a Quilter’s Stash
• New Colors for 2009/2010
• Using Prints in a Color Palette
• Creating a Quilter’s Color Wheel

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.

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!

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.