Build your color confidence with this easy trick

Written by Diane Harris on October 24, 2024. Posted in Blog, Fabric Savvy, How-tos and Ideas, Inspiration, Quilt Lifestyle

I’ve learned the most about color by making blocks and entire quilts that use only ONE hue.

When you’re limited to one color, you’re forced to branch out. You have to use different values (lightness or darkness). And it becomes necessary to tweak the color, which is where the magic happens.

Scarlet Spin by Diane Harris. Photo by Mellisa Karlin Mahoney. Used with permission.

Scarlet Spin was an early experiment in one-color quilts. It includes all sorts of reds: fire engine, brick, orange-red, wine, salmon, hot pink.

For the lights, I used whites and off-whites. Many of them have little bits of red as well.

The main lesson this quilt had for me was that all reds clash beautifully, something Mary Ellen Hopkins said years ago.

Here’s a secret: Red is the easiest color with which to make a single-hued quilt. You truly can’t mess it up as long as 1: you are brave, and 2: you think about contrast. Contrast means “difference.” There has to be a difference between the foreground and the background in order for anything to show up. The baby windmills in the block below show up nicely.

When there isn’t enough contrast, sometimes you get a block that looks like this:

And it’s even worse when I remove the lines, which is more realistic:

I started a quilt last week that uses just one color in every big block. It’s a design by Kathy Doughty and it’s in the book Making Quilts with Kathy Doughty.

I had orange fabrics out from working on a Halloween quilt, so that’s where I started. Because there’s only one color in each block, you have to find other ways to keep it interesting. I used big prints next to small prints. I went dark a few times. I wanted straight lines in some prints and curves in others.

See what I mean? Because you can’t change the color, you learn how to use other elements. Such a great exercise!

I had red-violets out because of the same Halloween quilt, so they were next. Using a design wall (ALWAYS!) helped me to see how it was shaping up. I used various textures, stripes, circles, lights, mediums and darks. Anything to keep it interesting. I threw in a print with orange in it just because I could.

Then there’s yellow. Yellow is so bossy. It wants to push you around and it tries to take over. It’s tricky to get yellow to show up against a light background, so I dipped into deep golden prints. Lots of texture. Natural shapes like flowers and leaves against manmade shapes like squares and straight lines.

Are you getting excited about one-color blocks yet? How about entire one-color quilts? I sure am.

Lucky, designed and made by Diane Harris

Green is another fun color to play with, as I did for my little Lucky quilt. And since you’ve read this far, here’s a link to the complimentary pattern for Lucky: