Questions on Yellow, Free Quilt Pattern
I did a Facebook Live about yellow for quilters this week and you can see it below.
I didn’t have time to answer all of the yellow questions that people left me so I’ll start to do that in this post.
The most general question that plagues all of us was asked a couple of times:
Why does yellow feel brighter than other colors?
I didn’t know the answer to this question until I did some research on yellow this week. What I learned is that different colors naturally have different levels of luminosity. In other words, some colors appear to be brighter than others.
On workwithcolor.com I found this color wheel which they converted to grayscale (read more here).
You can see that yellow has the highest luminance value. Yellow is only six percentage points away from white. Blue has the lowest luminance value, which surprised me.
I used my 3-in-1 Color Tool from C&T Publishing to find the pure hues of yellow and blue, and pulled the closest fabrics I could find in my stash to match.
Then I made Windmill blocks by combining each fabric with a white background.
This was an eye-opener. It’s clear how much more the blue shows up against the white than the yellow does. Yellow and white are so close that there isn’t much contrast. But the blue contrasts starkly with the white.
So why does yellow feel brighter than other colors?
Not to sound flippant, but it’s because yellow IS BRIGHTER than other colors. From a scientific color standpoint, yellow actually has more luminosity than any other color on the wheel.
This explains why yellow can be so bossy.
Yellow can overtake a quilt even when there isn’t really that much yellow present. Many quilters have had this experience.
I learned a lot about yellow when I made my giant pineapple quilt. It was tricky to get those yellows to show up against a very light background.
I dug into my golds and almost browns to make it work. If I make another one, I will make it easier by choosing a darker background color.
In honor of this week’s theme of yellow, you can have my complimentary pineapple quilt pattern by filling out the form below by August 16–that’s three days only. I’ll have more on yellow in a future post.
If you’re already getting my emails, don’t worry! I will include the link to this pattern in my next message so you can have it too!
Tags: fabric savvy, free quilt pattern, make extraordinary scrap quilts, pineapple quilt, scrap quilt, scrap quilts, subscribe