One tricky thing about choosing fabrics and using them in a quilt is working with value. Not color, mind you, but the saturation of color making value light, medium, dark, and every range in between.
The quilt in the following pictures is the one I made for my nephew Jackson, he was born in February of this year.
The soft colors I’d chosen in this palette presented special challenges because the differences in value were difficult to detect and I started with over 30 fabrics.
Since this quilt is made of only one repeating block, the Square in a Square block, I laid out my color combinations for each block before sewing any blocks together. My goal was to get an arrangement of one darker center square surrounded by a lighter square and the next block to have the opposite value composition: a lighter center square surrounded by a darker outer square.
This is one great example of why a design wall is so handy!
The next pictures show the same arrangement of fabric, only the color saturation was removed from the picture on the right leaving only the value (to accomplish this using photo software, use either a black & white button or adjust the color saturation to 0).
Overall, it’s not terrible, but looking from one block to the next, I found a few problematic blocks (in my opinion, after all, this all comes down to preference). I’ve circled a few blocks to examine further, although I ended up changing more than just these three in the final arrangement.
Take a look at the first circled block closest to the top. When referring to the color picture, you can easily see the difference in color between the green and yellow, but when looking at value only, there is no contrast.
Next, the block circled in the middle of the quilt when looking at the black and white version looks great as far as contrast between values goes. But look at the color photo, the "dark" yellow blends almost indiscriminately with its light-in-value neighbors. I decided I didn’t like that tricky yellow and decided against using it in this quilt.
Lastly, the block circled in the last row of the quilt was a bad combination of fabrics. In the black and white photo, it doesn’t even appear there are two different fabrics, and the color photo isn’t much better.
Back to the drawing board – er, design wall.
I removed some fabrics that I was having a hard time pairing and rearranged blocks to give an even placement of darks throughout the quilt. Here is a picture of the finished quilt, in color and in black and white. To me, it looks much better than the arrangement above.
By alternating the position of the values from block to block, there is a secondary design that emerges: large light and dark stars as I’ve outlined in red above.
When there is no amount of squinting you can do to distinguish which fabric is darker, when the green or red plastic viewfinders aren’t cutting it, when you can’t get to a copy machine to make a black and white copy to determine value, try taking a photo with your digital camera, upload it and remove the color. The results should be clear.