Splendid colour tips for quilters: All the colours in one quilt

Today’s splendid tips topic isn’t just one colour, but all the colours – and all at once. In this post, you will see – again – what matters more for your quilt than colour choices do. You will also get seven tips that help you use a multitude of (or all) colours in your quilt while avoiding a chaotic look.

What to watch out for when using many colours?

My instant reaction to this question is: “nothing!” Though to be honest, there really are a few things to watch out for.

If you make a wild, improvisational, unplanned and multicoloured quilt surface, its viewer may not easily find anything there to focus on. If you put such a quilt on show, most of the audience would be likely to move quickly past it to see the next quilt.

Even so, a riotously colourful quilt may be fantastic and lovable as an item meant to be used!

For example, the overall rhythm of my Spectrolite quilt is inconsistent because some blocks have a really harsh value contrasts whereas others have very little contrast. Artistically, it is therefore less successful.

Whatever this quilt may be lacking in design, it has still been a good staple on the couch, doing the core work that quilts do. It does its job just as well as any of my more successful quilts.

How to use the colourful approach with success?

Spectrolite is one of my favourite examples of what not to do. What you should do instead is make sure that your colourful surface has rhythm or value contrast – or better yet, both! Here are seven ways you can do that.

1. Use every colour, but make only one-colour blocks

The first successful way to use all the colours in one quilt is to use only one colour per block. Organise your single-colour blocks harmoniously or all over, perhaps choose a sashing in a neutral colour (black, grey, white) or two neutrals, and all of a sudden, your all-the-colours quilt doesn’t look chaotic.

Here’s my Early to Rise quilt as an example of this approach:

2. Think of your block in terms of value, not colour

Another way to use a wide variety of colours in one quilt is to make the blocks look similar despite their colour. And the way do that is to assign each component of the block a value: dark, medium dark, medium light, light.

My Twinkle! quilt is an example of this approach:

Every block has light areas, mid-value areas and dark areas in the same positions. Contrast between those areas is more or less uniform, which tames the multitude of colours. Again, an intentional-looking, yet colourful result.

Another example is the Ace of Diamonds quilt, which I made according to an excellent, free tutorial/pattern "Plaid-ish" by Kitchen Table Quilting. It is the perfect exercise for you if you aren’t certain that value does the work while colour gets the credit.

Oh and I have one more example - the Busy quilt:

Busy has been my best-selling pattern so far, and one of the reasons for the popularity may be that already the cover pictures shows how many different coloured pieces one can use, and still create an orderly enough result.

3. Make blocks with an ombré effect

Instead of picking colours, choose a variety of light, mid-value and dark fabrics. Your fabrics can be of any colour or pattern. Then, create blocks that play on value in an ombré way. For example, a free Instagram tutorial by @sushi.farmer shows how to make a Scrappy pixels block.

My pixel blocks became the Prince Valiant quilt, which features every colour in the rainbow - and often, several colours per block:

4. Build rhythm with a neutral element

The fourth option is to use a neutral of your choice to create a standard rhythm to your surface. For example, when a certain component of your block is always neutral – black, grey, white – the rest of the components may be however colourful you choose. Remembering that your colourful pieces need to have enough value contrast with the neutral that you have picked for the blocks.

The Omega quilt is an example of this approach. Here are four Omega blocks:

There is a commercial tutorial for the Omega block. The tutorial includes instructions on creating pools of colour to your quilt surface.

5. Build rhythm with a repeating feature

This is the fifth idea for ensuring that a multitude of colours and a wide variety of blocks do not finish into “everything and the kitchen sink” category – my orphan block quilt, Cocktail:

As you can see, there are all kinds of blocks in every colour, but the wide, repeating diagonals establish enough structure. I chose an unexpected colour for the wide lines, but if you don’t want to be as adventurous, you can of course choose a neutral fabric instead.

The Goodwill among Neighbours quilt is another example of this approach:

Here, the sashings are extremely narrow, and yet, they create enough structure so that the colourful quarter-log-cabin blocks look orderly and intentional, not haphazard.

6. Organise your colourful blocks based on their value

The Fast Lane quilt was my experiment of abandoning all colour planning and only creating blocks based on their dominant value. The blocks were of all imaginable colours, and I organised them according to the value of the ”background” colour.

Here you can see the colourful blocks in a more random order:

Compare that to the finished quilt where every block is indeed in the order of its value:

The previous layout did not have rhythm but the finished quilt does.

Because a human eye cannot be trusted to recognise faint differences in value from patterned patches of different colours, I took photos of the blocks and turned them into black-and-white, which shows value differences more reliably.

7. Organise your colourful blocks into pools of colour

The seventh way to organise blocks of all colours into intentional-looking layouts is related to the first one and the previous one, but here, the blocks are small. Small blocks that seem single-coloured can also be organised into pools of colours, like I did for the Upswing quilt:

This is a lovely photo because you can see our late kitty Sokeri, who used to help me with all my quilt designs.

Final thoughts about all the colours in a single quilt

These seven ideas could help you if you struggle with colour choices because this way, you would not have to choose. They may be helpful also if you struggle with combining fabrics that don’t obviously match.

If you have never thought of using all the colours or just many colours but would like to try, the Plaid-ish quilt tutorial is a great way to start.

Also, if you don’t want to use all the colours, that is okay too! You should do YOU. Happy quilting!

Earlier posts in the splendid colour tips series

In case you have missed some of my colour tips, here is a comprehensive list:

I’ll be discussing other colour topics soon, sharing tips and stories from my own quilts. If you want to be sure to get all my colour tips – and possibly other fun updates as well – you can subscribe to my biweekly newsletter.

(When subscribing, remember to take the second step: you will get an email asking you to confirm. My emailing system can only send you the newsletters if you have clicked on the button in that email.)

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