Quilt Color Ideas: Adding 'Pop' to Your Quilt

Quilting is my passion, but color is my true love. Color can be very daunting for a lot of us though. And one of the ways that we're kind of fearful of color is that idea that we're adding too much. One of the things that I try to impart to my students, especially my color students, is that adding a little bit of the unexpected is usually what makes a quilt really dynamic. Whenever you go to a quilt store or a quilts show and you see lots of quilts being shown and displayed, chances are the ones that really catch your eye, catch your eye because they have some sort of pop of color.

Some color there that you weren't expecting. It's a way to really invite the viewer in for a closer look and have them stay around a lot longer as they look at your work, which is really what we all want. We create these beautiful things and we want people to enjoy them. So let me show you a couple of different ways of introducing that pop of color to make it look as though it belongs, but also act as a focal point. In this first piece that was made by one of my studio mates, Tamara Luborer.

She used this background filled with all these cool water colors. All the way from the blue violets into the blue greens. And it's a very soft, delicate palate. That pop of color that she added was the direct compliment of those colors. She used the reds and the red-oranges and oranges.

And we have these wonderful stripes here of pieced color that just add that interest. It's really what makes the whole quilt, is that little slice of color. In this next piece, it's the blue that's acting as the pop of color. And the reason why it's getting so much attention is not because of its color necessarily. It's because of its part of the color scale.

It's the purest hue of all the fabrics being used in the piece. The rest of the fabrics are somewhat toned. That means they're a little bit duller. So this bright, pure hue really gets your attention. And it was used in such a way that it leads you across the surface of the quilt in an S formation.

So it's doing something more than just imparting color. It's actually moving the eye of the viewer to see the whole piece. And finally here we have this really rich background. Very deep, very dark. This was also made by Tamara.

And then she added in this wonderful light melon color. Which, again, is the direct compliment of the colors being used. She brought it out here again to the edge and included some stitch in it too in the same exact color, but a different part of the color scale. It's the shade of that color. So those colors are really working together and playing off of each other to give you just that pop of visual interest.

Using the direct compliment is almost always a good choice when it comes to saying, you know, what color should I use as an accent? Look at the direct compliment of the colors that your quilt is based on and it's probably the answer. So I hope you think about adding just a nice pop of color to really pick up the volume of your next quilt.