Mastering the illusion of transparency…when I look through the pages of Transparency Quilts by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, I do indeed feel the magic! Certain areas of each quilt seem to be floating above the rest, and my eyes rest quite happily on the smooth lines, calm patterns, and perfect color combinations.
Here’s some of what Weeks and Bill have to say about their newest book…
We love color, but we love the visual relationships among colors even more…our hope is that with this collection of quilts, you will begin to see color in a new way and grow in your understanding and appreciation of color in the process.
We have always had a different method of designing. We focus less on the individual blocks than on the relationships among all the pieces of the quilt. You’ll notice that some of the quilts in the book use block construction and others don’t. Going back and forth between design, color theory, and construction is endlessly fascinating to us. It was through this interest that we began creating designs with pieces that, when viewed as a whole, give the illusion that one color is overlaid on another. We refer to these quilts collectively as transparency quilts.
In architecture, interior design, and product design in the past half century, there has been a focus on making materials seem lighter and more airy. Houses that used to be constructed from stone and wood can now be built as glass boxes that appear to float on the landscape. Televisions that used to be massive pieces of furniture are now thin enough to hold in the palm of your hand.
Similarly, the color options for quilting textiles were extremely limited until the mid-twentieth century. Advances in printing technology and textile production have given twenty-first-century quilters color choices unimaginable to previous generations of quiltmakers. Without such wide varieties of fabric available, we would never have been able to conceive of transparency quilts.
We hope this book will help you refine your understanding of color theory and give you a new perspective on how some of your favorite fabrics might be used in a new way. We also hope that you might rethink some of your assumptions about fabrics that may appear to lack potential, but in fact can play an essential role in achieving the effect of transparency.
Visit our Flickr gallery to see more lovely images from this book!
So here we go…one lucky person will win a copy of Transparency Quilts.
To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us something about your own success or challenges with color.
Deadline to enter is 6:00 pm PST on Sunday, December 11, 2011. One comment will be drawn at random to win…the winner will be contacted via email and posted here on the blog next week.
Increase your chances to win! Enter an extra comment for each of the actions you take below. Tell us what you did and thanks in advance for spreading the word!
Congrats to Hannele, whose name was drawn at random from the comments on last week’s post. She won a package of Visi-GRID Quilter’s Template Sheets.
I’m pretty sure this season sports more bows than any other. If you find making the perfect bow a struggle, then this free Bow-making tutorial might be for you.
I cut the graph paper a bit smaller than the covers to keep the pages protected. Using a gridded cutting mat as a placement guide and my japanese screw punch, I drilled holes in the covers, then the papers.
