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

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!

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.

Announcing the Color Mastery Georgia Book Tour!  I’ll be visiting ten locations across the state April 21 – May 5, so save those dates.  Come out and see me at your local quilt shop, guild, or bookstore.  Here are the dates and locations:
April 21:  Apple Country Quilt Guild, Ellijay
April 23:  East Cobb Quilt Guild Evening Group, Marietta
April 24:  East Cobb Quilt Guild, Marietta
April 25:  Foxtale Book Shoppe, Woodstock
April 29:  Magical Threads, Dahlonega
April 30:  Sew Bee It, Ringgold
May 1:     Log Cabin Patchworks, Hiawassee
May 2:     Sew Much Fun, Columbus
May 4:     Stepping Stones, St. Simons Island
May 5:     Colonial Quilts, Savannah

Gather your best quilting girlfriends and make it a party!  I’ll be chatting about how you can master the color in your quilts and where to spot the best color trends, and signing books for you and your friends.  Shop owners would absolutely adore you for calling ahead and reserving your own copy of Color Mastery, so they will have enough on hand.  And who knows what else we’ll be doing?

I’ll be blogging each day, so you can visit the town and shops as I do.  Here’s my itinerary on Google Maps, so you can plan your visit to your local shop (complete with addresses for each stop). And if you would like to keep up with the latest updates as they become available, subscribe to the RSS feed for the tour.

I’ll see you in your hometown!

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!

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!

How does it work?  Here are the details:

• If you live close to me in Georgia (within one day’s drive), I’ll visit your group in person.  If you’re more than one day’s drive, willing to pick up my travel expenses and provide a place for me to stay, I’ll visit your group as well.  Otherwise, we can visit over the telephone or via Skype, an online video conferencing site (don’t worry – it’s easy.  You don’t need any special equipment).
• Encourage your bee group members to purchase my book(s) and to bring them to the meeting so I can autograph them, if it’s to be an in-person visit. If it will be a speakerphone visit, I can mail autographed bookplates to you. Buying the author’s books is the polite thing to do. Since authors usually are not paid by book groups for their time (though gas money is always appreciated), the least you can do is for the majority of the members to buy the book.
• Print and bring a list of discussion questions for the book. I’ll be providing a bee group discussion guide soon on this website, so keep checking back! Also, encourage your members to come prepared with one or two other questions for the author.
• For in-person visits, I like to arrive 10-15 minutes early and set up a small display of my books, bookmarks, and a sign-up list for my email newsletter. I appreciate the opportunity to sell books to members who may not have had a chance to buy one before the meeting or who may want to gift the books to others.
• Arrange for someone from your bee to introduce me, thank me for coming, then have the members of the bee group introduce themselves. Especially if this is a speakerphone visit, it’s helpful for me to know something about each member to distinguish them. And, if it’s a speakerphone visit, members should re-state their name each time they ask a question.
• Relax and enjoy the interaction. If you normally serve food during your meeting, continue to do so. Just let me know beforehand. I certainly won’t turn down a meal or a glass of wine! Make sure someone watches the time so I can stay on schedule, and plan for time at the end to autograph books, if it’s an in-person visit.

I’m booking small groups now, so float this idea before your group.  Discuss.  Get out the calendars.  I’ll see you there!