The Art of Choosing: Warm vs. Cool

The Art of Choosing is a series discussing fabric, color, and the fabric selection process! Here's what's been posted so far:

1. Recognizing a Fabric's Overall Color
2. Folding
3. Stash Storage
4. Organizing Your Stash by Color
5. Building a Well Rounded Stash
6. Supplementing a Fabric Line
7. Reader Stashes
8. Building a Scheme Around a Single Fabric
9. Building a Scheme Around a Photograph
10. Light vs. Dark
This Week: Warm vs. Cool

This week we are going to talk about how to build one of my favorite schemes, a Warm vs. Cool Color Scheme!

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

I first started playing around this concept after a happy accident. My first two quilts were a warm color quilt and a cool color quilt. After finishing both, I ended up with a lot of scraps. Playing around with little triangles I made the block above and thus started my love for warm vs. cool! :)

Finished Value Quilt, originally uploaded by jenib320.

I'm going to lay things out a little differently this time! First I'm going to show you my initial fabric pull, then we're going to look at warm and cool separately and finally the fabrics that didn't make the cut and my final stack!

1st Pull

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

These are the fabrics that I grabbed to put together my stacks. This is without any "edits" yet! Lots of different value and accents! There isn't really anything wrong with these stacks, but not let's simplify and streamline them!

Warm Colors

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

For my warm color stack I choose red, light pink, fuschia, orange, and gold. I could have opted to include more colors like peach, traditional yellow and additional shades of orange.

Cool Colors

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

For my cool color stack I choose lime green, turquoise, plum and light purple. I could have included a wide range of other greens and blues.

1st Edit

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

These fabrics got pulled pretty quickly after my first pull. Many of them at distracting accents and a few had tones that simply didn't match with the rest of the colors.

2nd Edit

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

These fabrics didn't make it for a variety of reasons! I paired down my color palette to focus on certain shades, ditched a few darker shades, and also set a limit of 27 prints per stack.

Final Stack

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

I finally ended up with this pair of stacks! I choose a variety of light and dark prints but tried to stick mostly to medium shades. In general avoided fabrics with white or really light backgrounds, as they don't necessarily read well as a single color. I used mainly tone on tone and color + white fabrics.

I think the most important tip for putting together these stacks is taking care when choosing fabrics with accents. When I did use a fabric with an accent, I stuck to fabrics that have generally warm or cool accents. For instance, in my warm stack I used a pink Martini print by Amy Butler (9th from the top!). It has mostly pink, but has gold accents. Both are warm colors! Similarly with the cool stack, I choose a green Hopscotch print by Erin McMorris (8th from the top!). It is mostly green with turquoise accents. Both are cool colors!

Well, there we go! We've now made it through the bulk of this series! Don't worry, there are still going to be weekly posts for a while longer! There have been a few topics requested in the comments (now is your chance to make additional suggestions!) and a few topics I've realized I should have covered in the beginning! Then, in May, something else is going to finish this series off properly...

The Art of Choosing, originally uploaded by jenib320.

A Quilt Along! I'm working on a Warm vs. Cool quilt using simple patchwork! The quilt along will kick off sometime in the beginning or middle of May after I graduate! School is about to get super busy, don't want to bite off more than I can chew! However, you will see little sneak peaks of the quilt you'll be making here and there! I hope you'll join in the fun! :)