Jo Avery – the Blog

Quilter’s Field Guide to Color Book Hop

 

I’ve long been an admirer of Rachel Hauser’s beautiful quilts and a reader of her excellent blog Stitched in Color. I was thrilled when I got to meet Rachel IRL at Festival of Quilts last year.

Rachel’s quilts have a wonderful sense of colour and use an eclectic mix of fabrics that always appeal to me, so I was very excited to hear she had written a book about using colour in quilts.

In ‘Quilter’s Field Guide to Color’ Rachel shares all her secrets and takes us through an adventure with colour. The book is so much fun and so informative!

As you know colour is very much my thing and I do teach and lecture on this subject, but I learnt loads of stuff from this book and it is mainly because of the way the book is set out. It’s properly interactive with a set of pull-out colour swatches that can be cut up and played with in a series of exercises.  There’s even an envelope at the back to keep your swatches in once you’ve cut them!

I was very happy to join in with Rachel’s book hop and was assigned ‘Seasons’ as my exercise.

This involved choosing different colours for the different seasons and laying them out on the grid provided. This is a great way to get you really considering colours and your feelings towards them.

 

Next Rachel suggests you make a block using colours from the current season. Well it’s still winter here but I am longing for spring so I chose my spring colours but tried to give things a wintery feel.

On the left are my spring swatches and on the right is my original fabric pull.

One of my favourite parts of the book is where Rachel takes you through a fabric pull in amazing detail, it’s absolutely fascinating and would be so useful to quilters who struggle with deciding which fabric to use (most of us I would think!).

She also includes a fantastic section on building your stash wisely which is invaluable.

 

The book focuses on one block design, bear paw (which suits me obvs!) and offers 3 different ways to use this with instructions to make these different blocks.

I really enjoyed stitching this one, a slightly different version of the Flower Pod block, and it’s definitely giving me an early spring vibe.  How lovely would a whole quilt of these look? I’ll add it to my list 😉

I can thoroughly recommend Rachel’s book, even if you never do any of the exercises there are so many mouth-watering eye candy images to drool over that it’s worth buying just for the inspiration!

But if you do buy, or already own a copy, then might I suggest that you join in with the Quilter’s Color Quest event that Rachel will be hosting on her blog and Instagram?

Over a six-month period, you’ll explore color together, using the themes and exercises in the book. Read more about it on Rachel’s blog here.

Plus catch up with all the stops on the book hop by visiting this post on Stitched in Color.

One comment

  1. What a lovely review, Jo. Thank you so very much for taking the time to be a part of this blog hop and for sharing all your thoughts about the book! I’m super honored that you would recommend it. I could definitely see the season in your pretty block. The picture of it on the blue wood with the floral washi tape is heavenly. Heart!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.