Quilters seem to be forever worried about color. Although I stand by the saying “Color gets the credit, value does the work”, color is important too. Here are three of my favorite color resources.

Tara Faughnan has a fantastic color sense. I took one of her block studies courses and very much enjoyed it, especially seeing her color choices for the palettes and watching her explain her process.

Here are some of the studies I made in her block studies program, all mashed together about to made into a quilt top. M. J. Kinman recently presented to our guild about her gemstone quilts, which are wonderful. In order to get the “sparkle” needed for her gems, she made an extensive study of color. She has now written a book called Crack the Color Code.

I can’t recommend the book highly enough! She has studied some seminal works on color and summarized them in clear, practical terms. I’m especially pleased that she explains Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, because I owned the book for years without being able to get through it!

Although I haven’t yet made anything with specific reference to MJ’s book, it does explain why tis little quilt I made a few years ago has some glow.

Finally, there’s an excellent free resource from Mitzie Schaefer of Jittery Wings Quilt Company. She calls her method “color flow” and offers a free workbook that explains it. If you follow this link to her website you should see a little floating window that says “Get the Workbook”. It’s free and I recommend it!

In addition to her ideas about color, she has definite opinions about quilt layout. Her website has video presentations about her preferred layout for some of her patterns, and I have found them useful. Here’s one quilt I made several years ago from her pattern “All the Good”.

What are your favorite color resources?