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!

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!

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!

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.

I also teach a class based on this concept, and it’s a blast:  it’s like going to a quilt show, as everyone’s quilt and results are different.

Enjoy!  And you can subscribe to my YouTube Channel here.

Color Mastery by Maria Peagler is an exciting book for the quilter who knows she needs to understand more about color and how to make it work, but has been frustrated by less organic and less hands-on approaches. This book would best be used by you if you can buy the book, review it a little on your own, and then take a class from the author.  Of course, some of you won’t be able to take Peagler’s classes, but if you are diligent and really do the exercises in the book, you’ll achieve a lot of skill on your own.

The very practical exercises in the book are set up to bring the student of color to a natural level of skillful use, by having you use your own fabric collection for all the exercises.   (This is not a book for learning to use paint or dye to create the colors of quilt compositions, but rather to learn to use fabrics as the colors in piecing and appliqué to create designs.)

Peagler asks, “Do you know where all of your fabric is stashed?” and advises you to take the time to collect all of your fabrics into one place, in order to have a very broad selection for the exercises ahead.  As a person trying to help the Earth become balanced again, I really appreciate this philosophy of Peagler’s, to ask us to work with what we have now and use it up!  We all know we own too much fabric now!!!

Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule, but it’s good to try to use up your stash, and using what you already were attracted to, in buying it, helps you learn your own natural taste in colors, as Peagler points out.  She is leading you gently into the sometimes scary realm of understanding color, and helping you see that your own preferences can all be made to work together in the right combinations.  Very interesting technique:  all exercises are done with color swatches of your very own, so you have a comfort zone right from the start in working with familiar things you love, in order to learn.

By creating a color wheel from your own stash, you start to realize your very own, personal vocabulary of color awareness.  Peagler then instructs you to work always with color swatches from your own stash of fabrics, in creating a color journal, as a way of “sketching” your ideas for your quilts.  She has you make your own color studies in your journal for grasping the color issues of hue, value, intensity, harmony, contrast, etc, which she explains in very practical terms.  Then you move on to in-depth studies of various kinds of color harmonies, such as complimentary and triadic, and eventually get to make up your very own color harmonies.  This is all done with hands-on exercises of pulling fabrics from your own stash, and making studies in your color journal.  I applaud that she suggests it’s fine to break the color rules when you feel like it, too.

The latter part of the book includes instructions for making specific quilts designed by Peagler, but with the specific color harmonies used being decided by you, with your fabrics.  She even includes instructions for some quilts intentionally made with leftover scraps from her earlier quilt designs, which makes me very happy to see.  Recycling is where it’s at!

I particularly enjoy how Peagler helps you focus your plans for your next quilt by pointing out that you need to know why you’re making this piece.  Your simple motives: you love a particular color; you want to make a soft, restful piece for a particular person; you have a topic you’re addressing, etc – will give you differing clues as to which colors and color harmonies you’ll choose to work with.

Color Mastery is packed full of very useful charts, illustrations, lists of tips, things to think about, and color wheels and harmony patterns.  Maria Peagler 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 very intuitive exercises that let you relax and play.  Encouraging you to take risks, try new things, and do your own thing, she will guide you to the other shore, where you handle color with joy and success.

So get your copy of Color Mastery now, rein in your entire stash to work with, and roll up your sleeves.  You’ll soon be helping your friends solve their color issues, passing on this nurturing and down-to-earth way of understanding your own joy of color success!

To use color effectively, you need to discover:

• Your color likes, dislikes, challenges, and strengths
• The DNA of color (also known as color theory)

Get started by keeping a color journal. It provides you the opportunity to play and to break free from what others are doing by discovering your own creative potential with the fabrics uniquely your own.

Supplies you’ll need:

• Sketchbook or Color Mastery Quilt Journal Kit CD (available at the book launch party and on this website soon!)
• Glue stick
• Scissors
• Inspirational photos
• Fabrics from your stash or scraps

Three ways to get started in your color journal:

1. Create a color palette from photos and magazine clippings by identifying their main colors and mining your stash, cutting and pasting swatches in your journal.
   
2. Aim for a greater variety of lights and darks in your palette.  See how the contrast in your quilt would become stronger with the addition of a greater range of lights and darks.
   
3. Take the first step in learning color theory by making your own color wheel with your stash (the color wheel chart is available in the blog sidebar).  It’s an eye-opening exercise to see your stash reflected back to you in an arrangement that places similar colors together and different colors opposite each other on the wheel.

The time I spend in my color journal pays off ten times over, as I discover what colors appeal to me, those that don’t, and how I can develop fresh color palettes using the colors I love.  And I even learn how to appreciate challenging colors and make them work in my quilts.  What can you discover about color once you begin keeping a color journal?

Look for a new product at the end of this month:  the Color Mastery Quilt Journal Kit CD.  It will have printable pages for your journal, both blank & gridded with color harmonies along the bottom (see photo above), and guided exercise pages.  It’s a great way to get started and a journal is as close as your home printer!

Last week I stopped by Michele Foster’s Quilting Gallery blog and premiered my Color Wheel video, offering a giveaway to those who made their own color wheels and sent photos to me.  Only two Quilting Gallery readers took advantage of the offer, so guest what girls?  You both win!!!  Just like on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, when she holds a contest, she can’t stand for anyone to lose – me neither.  So Sarah and Ellen:  you are both lucky winners!  Send me your mailing addresses and your personally autographed copies are on their way to you!

See how different the color wheels are?  Both are a reflection of their owner’s stash, they used completely different fabrics, but you can see the transition of color around the wheel.  Great job and congratulations!  You can get your own color wheel chart by clicking on the link in my sidebar.

This week the local papers did articles on the book.  The first is print edition only, but their website offers a photo of me, and more importantly, you can see my stash in the background (scroll down and it’s on the left sidebar).  It’s well organized, but not huge by any means.

And here’s the article in my neighborhood newspaper as well:

My son’s band teacher saw the articles and asked him if I was famous.  My son almost fell off his stool laughing.  His teacher also asked him if we had a lot of quilts in the house, to which he answered, “No.”  Where does he live?  A quilt in every room of the house, thank you.  Some even have two!  Speaks volumes to the preoccupations of a teenaged-boy.

Congratulations Donna Coffey!  You’re the lucky winner of the autographed copy of Color Mastery from all the of wonderful comments from Annie’s Quilting Stash listeners.  Wow – the response was fantastic, and I’d delighted ya’ll enjoyed the podcast.  Thank you for stopping by and visiting!

If you didn’t win, you can find Color Mastery at your local quilt shop.  As Patsy Thompson, machine quilting expert, told me:

“I’m seeing reviews of it and a picture of the cover EVERYWHERE!”