COLOUR THEORY

There's nothing us modern quilters love more than a bold colour pop set against a crisp white background. Rebecca Bryan shows you how to balance your brights to get that perfect palette

There’s nothing us modern quilters love more than a bold colour pop set against a crisp white background. Rebecca Bryan shows you how to balance your brights to get that perfect palette every time

This issue, I'm going to focus on light and bright colour palettes. They make for such fun and happy projects, so I'd like to show a few ways I like to play with my ‘lights’.

Typically, I organise my colour chips into groups of colour families. For example, light pink with reds, pale turquoise with blues, etc. My neutral chips also have their own pile. In this exercise, I'll be adding my light colours into the neutrals to expand the palettes.

Bubble Gum

This colour palette looks exactly like the bubble gum ice cream I would habitually order when I was a kid. It made me so happy, and the colours are still making me happy, though admittedly I would definitely choose chocolate ice cream over bubble gum these days.

I'm going to show you this palette with two options – either palette would work for a quilt, depending on your goal.

The first palette is a bold, graphic interpretation. The pinks and the blue-greens stand unapologetically against the stark white. In my mind I can see this version working well in a minimal, geometric design.

Instead of just using plain white as a contrast, sometimes I like to use a white with an undertone of the palette. In this case, I'm going for Kona Pearl Pink as my white. Against the blue-greens, the Pearl Pink reads as white. It works double time as it aids in gradually blending the pink palette from low to high volume.

What I'm interested in is how different this palette looks with these different neutrals. The pink neutrals bring a more nuanced feel to the combination of the other colours. As a whole, it's less bold and more comfortable, but also somehow more sophisticated.

Orange Parfait

This palette is another example of using neutrals to lighten and brighten up a colour scheme. Let's start with some really, really bright sunny colours - yellow and orange.

Yellow and orange are sure pretty, but they can quickly be too much when combined, right? Let's watch

what happens as we add in some low-volume yellows and oranges.

I'm loving the colour movement in this palette. I can already feel myself being drawn in to it, rather than being a bit overwhelmed by the saturated shades.

As a final touch, I'm adding in some pure neutrals. Sometimes it's fun to use a variety of shades to ease that contrast between the colours and white. I love how the subtle colours and neutrals seem to be doing the most work here, adding texture and movement. I can see this palette working well in an improv quilt. Lots of room to play!

Now I move my palettes on to the next step of creating an actual fabric bundle. If you want to see how I've been using these colours, visit bryanhousequilts.com to see my fabric pull blogposts! And if you create a fabric bundle using one of these palettes, we'd love to see it – tag @lovequiltingmag and use #LPQColourPalettes