Tilkunviilaaja®

This post is part of my Splendid colour tips series, where I share helpful information to help you choose fabrics and colours with more confidence. In this post, I share my thoughts and practical tips about the use of purple in quilting and use my own quilts and quilted items as examples. In this post you’ll discover:  how different purples can behave next to blue, red, yellow, green and turquoise common colour-contrast problems when sewing with purple (and how to avoid them) reliable ways to combine purple fabrics successfully in your own quilts  Purple is a colour for queens, kings, and royalty. It represents success and wisdom. It has traditionally been associated with wealth because the colour was difficult and expensive to produce. Only the richest could afford purple garments. In quilts, purple isn’t a symbol – it is a colour that has its own characteristics. What to watch out for when using purple in quilts Certain purples can look brown in the finished quilt, so wa...

Grey is one of the most – if not the most – versatile neutral colours in quilting. It is a softer colour than black, and it will help your highlight colours stand out. In this post, I share practical tips about the use of grey in quilting using my own quilts and quilted items as examples. Grey represents neutrality, simplicity, peace, future-orientedness and logic. Grey is not an emotional colour, and it is associated with technology, industrial activity, control, professionalism and even with elegance. Not all greys are colourless – a pure mix of black and white. There are all shades, ranging from yellowish to purplish and brownish: And then there is the special brown-grey colour called taupe. Taupe is the colour that is just as brown as it is grey. The word “taupe” comes from the French word for mole whose fur is of that colour. It may be that quilters find taupe more interesting than other people because Japanese quilters use it abundantly and in very chic ways. They are maste...

Today’s post concentrates on brown colour in quilts. It may not be the most exciting colour, but it can be very useful! You will get a tip or two on what to watch out for and many examples of how to use brown fabrics in your quilts with success. Brown is a colour in its own right, even though it is not one of the colours of the rainbow. One can also think of it as a very dark orange. In the CMYK colour model, brown is created by mixing yellow, magenta, and black. I remember the carboard palettes of watercolours at school: one got brown by mixing red, yellow and blue. The result was usually an ugly brown. And the water used for cleaning the brush became rather an unattractive shade of brown after one had dipped the brush in it a couple of times. Wikipedia mentions that both European and US polls reveal that brown is the people’s least popular favourite colour. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown ) What to watch out for when using brown Too much brown may make the quilt ...