How to Choose Fabric for a Quilt Using Fabric Value
Heather ThomasHeather Thomas provides essential tips for choosing fabrics for your quilts by using fabric value. Understand the importance of fabric value and how it is relative. See how the value of fabric can impact the quality of your finished quilt. Use these helpful tips to choose the right fabric for your beautiful quilts.
There are many different attributes to fabrics that we choose to make our quilts with. It's not just about the color. It's not just about the wonderful print that's on the fabric. Sometimes the value plays a really important role. Value is a word that's really misused a lot, because it's really very simple.
It's simply how light or how dark something is. Where it gets confusing is the fact that value is relative. What is light in one group might be medium in another, what is dark in one group might be medium in another. So when we look at some fabrics, so here I have laid out six fabrics. They're variegated from light to dark in violet.
So here we have very light and very dark. And then we have varieties of mediums in the middle. But if I were to take these two fabrics out, now this is the light fabric in the group. Or if I were to take this out, this becomes the dark fabric in the group. So value is relative.
One of the things that makes value so important, though, is that it helps to delineate space. That's a really fancy way of saying it separates this area on the quilt from this area on the quilt. So we can use value to our advantage. Now, in this Mariners Compass, we have 16 spikes in it, and each spike is made from just one color. However, we've chosen a very light value and a darker value of each of those colors, so that you can see the difference between this long space and this long space.
There isn't a color difference. There isn't a textural difference. There's merely a value difference. In this case, the value is really important. I hope this helps you understand the value of value.
And the next time you're choosing fabrics for your quilts, you can really think about how those fabrics are going to occupy the different areas on that quilt.
This was just an introduction to what value is. Not on how to choose fabric according to value for different results. I was taken aback when I realized that the video was over!
Thank you..beautiful quilts!!!🌻🌻🍀🍀🍀🌻🌻
Thanks for explaining value so clearly Finally I get it
I cannot seem to get any of the videos to play. They are frozen at the initial ad.
Very interested
Could not load video. It saysthevideo is not compatible with my device. I have an apple 6!