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!

Early adopters of Color Mastery loved the charts and miniature color wheels I included in the book. In fact, they couldn’t get enough of them. I heard from Liz, one of my readers, who just can’t bring herself to cut the mini color wheels from the back, and since color copying never gives accurate results, she wanted more of them. What if I had them printed up and offered in packs?

Well, I’ve done even better. I’m offering the Color Journal CD so you can print and customize your journal to your liking. You know how much I adore keeping a journal, even making my own with watercolor paper, hand-sewn binding, and fabric covers. But they still weren’t right. I wanted to have graph paper and blank paper together, so I could design a quilt on the graph paper, and draw, sketch, or audition fabric swatches on the blank paper. Now you can do both, and each journal page has all six color harmonies listed, so you don’t have to remember those fun names!

Plus, every chart and color wheel is included.  I had no idea when I wrote Color Mastery how important the Color Harmony chart would be, and I couldn’t predict you’d want more of them!  Now you don’t have to travel to the copy shop to make copies of the color wheel charts you fill in with your fabric swatches.  It’s all on the CD.

And I’ve made it affordable.  $16.95 for a lifetime of unlimited journals, the way you want them.  I’ve already made one journal I keep in a three-ring binder – with pockets no less!  I’ll be printing my next one on special paper, giving it a lovely binding, and presenting it as a gift to my quilting friend whose birthday is this month (not naming names in case she reads this!).

Ok, I’m gushing about keeping a journal and the Color Journal CD.  It’s available only from the Color Mastery store, and I even offer a special price if you order the book and CD.  Enjoy.

Standing room-only last Friday evening at Sew Memorable for the Color Mastery book launch party. Jeanne’s team was so sweet and excited! They made homemade baby chocolate eclairs and weekend employees took off their day jobs to work in the shop all day to help Jeanne set up. Friends, quilters, even both of my sons’ teachers came to hear all the details on color in their quilts. I was amazed at the women who had “thought” about quilting, but never had taken the plunge, who were excited about putting fabrics together in a gorgeous quilt.

I was so touched by the women who told me:

• My daughter picks out colors for me and now I can do it!
• Thank you for writing this book – we really needed it.
• My sister selects my colors and I never like them.

So many quilters who were frustrated about color but now are excited about the prospect of mastering the color in their quilts.  Everyone went home with a brand new product, requested by you – dear readers! The Color Mastery Quilt Journal Kit on CD! Printable journal pages, all on a CD, so you can print and customize your own color journal. I’ll have more details as the week goes on – the CD will be available here soon!