Rainbow Rose QAL Week 1: Fabric Selection

Happy National Quilting week and Welcome to our Rainbow Rose QAL! 

For our schedule see the Quilt-A-Long tab at the top of this page.  Over the next 6 weeks we are going to be exploring the colour wheel and making this block, the Rainbow Rose, in your choice of 2 sizes to make either a 40” x 40” baby quilt or a larger lap or bed quilt 80” x 80”.

Prizes!
Joining us on our QAL journey are our very generous sponsors (see below).   We are kicking off the QAL with a fat quarter bundle to the value of €20 from LoveFabric.ie.

To win a bundle of fabrics from the Cotton Candy range by Dashwood Studios, link up a photo, instagram or flickr image, or a blog post of your fabric pull for the Rainbow Rose block by clicking the blue linky button at the end of this post.

Random number generator will choose a winner to be announced next week!  The linky will be open until midnight next Tuesday and the winner announced next Wednesday when we move onto cutting and piecing some of our block!

The Rainbow Rose Quilt Block

The Rainbow Rose quilt block is based on the colour wheel rather than the rainbow itself. A traditional rainbow has 7 colours, though in reality your eye can see way more colours than that. You don't always see all of the rainbow spectrum in real life, depending on your position to the sun, but when you get a good rainbow view, it's pretty spectacular isn't it!

In school we learned that the rainbow is made up of Red, Orange, Yellow , Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet, by remembering :

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain under a rainbow sky.

There are other mnemonics to remember the rainbow colours and I'll leave you to look them up. I have no idea who poor Richard was but his defeat is certainly famous and has been stuck in my head since 5th year Physics!

The colour wheel usually contains 12 colours and many books have been written on colour theory especially for quilters! Not to go into too much detail but to give an overview, the colour wheel is typically made up of:

3 primary colours which are used to make up all other colours.

3 secondary colours - Mixing 2 primary colours gives you the secondary colours

6 Tertiary colours - mixing secondary +primary colours

Light is different from paints and pigments in that the primary colours of light are Red, Green and Blue or RGB. You will often see an RGB value in photo editing software. Red Green & Blue combined make white and the absence of Red, Green and Blue gives you black. Varying the values of each can give you many colours which can be displayed on your monitor or TV. All the various colours that can be displayed may not necessarily be able to be printed. Paints and Pigments are a little different!

For paints and pigments, the primary colours of the traditional colour wheel, are taken as Red, Yellow & Blue. (Versions of these colours commonly used are Magenta, Yellow and Cyan! This is what you will find in your printer with the addition of black - CMYK.)


Mixing 2 primary colours gives you the secondary colours:

Red + Yellow = Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

Red + Blue = Purple

Mixing secondary colours gives you tertiary colours which are very descriptive e.g.

green-yellow, yellow–orange, orange-red, red–purple, purple-blue and blue–green


Putting all of these into the colour wheel gives you:

Red

Red-Orange (Coral)

Orange

Orange-Yellow (Amber)

Yellow

Yellow-Green (Lime or Chartreuse)

Green

Green-Blue (Cyan or Turquoise)

Blue

Blue- Purple (Violet)

Purple

Purple-Red (Red berry colours or Cerise)

Quilts can still read as a rainbow palette even when one colour is missing. Instead of purple I included greys in my triangle quilt and started with green at the centre instead of red!   

For the purpose of our Rainbow Rose try and find various prints from 12 to 16 colours to get you all the way around the colour wheel. I included pink, turquoise and sky blue as extra steps to make the transitions blend. While technically lighter versions of red, blue- green and blue it can make the colour changes in the wheel look more smooth and I think more pleasing in the quilt block.

I broke open charm packs and layer cakes as well as pulling fat quarters to make it all the way around the wheel! It helped a lot to say the colour names in my head like orange-red to pick a blender, telling myself coral or amber, I found I was restricting myself somewhat! Trust your instincts. Everyone sees colour differently. I see blue-greens more as green than blue so go with your gut and what feels right for you!

In the end I went with a scrappy look and tried to find 4 different prints for each of the corners, Orange, Pink, Blue & Green and at least 2 different prints for the middles which for me were Purple, Red, Yellow and Turquoise. Avoid prints that have too much white in them, a little is ok, as long as the overall colour reads as the dominant colour you want, it will work!

What you will need!

For the baby quilt we will be using 5" colour squares + background fabric.

For the bed quilt we will be using 10" colour squares + background fabric. This could be a good opportunity to use some large print fabric you may have in your stash.


Colour is relative and can be perceived differently by the brain when placed next to another colour. As there are so many colours in the wheel itself I would suggest keeping the background fabric to a neutral colour such as white,black, grey or beige. I choose Kona Snow as my background colour - it's one of my favourite off white fabrics to use. You could play with high value/low volume fabrics too for less contrast in your quilt  or a light tone on tone fabric would work beautifully too!


You will need a yard of background fabric for the baby quilt (40" x 40") approx.
 
The lap/bed quilt block finishes at 72" x 72" and using a background colour border it will finish at 80" x 80" and require 3 1/4 yards of background fabric. If you want to make just the block on its own you will need 2 yards of background fabric.

So get gathering and next week we'll start cutting up all that lovely fabric!

Remember to link up to win this brilliant prize from LoveFabric.ie.

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