The Quilter's Practical Guide to Color

About Becky Goldsmith

Becky Goldsmith and business partner Linda Jenkins started Piece O’ Cake Designs in 1994. Designing and making quilts, writing books, and teaching others how to make quilts is a better career than Becky could ever have imagined. For more information visit www.pieceocake.com.

Workshop on the Web

The opening sentence in this book sums it up: We all love colour. Some of us may struggle with the idea of colour theory but there are ways of easing yourself into the subject. 'The Colour Mixing Guide' by Julie Collins (also reviewed in this issue) is a good starting point but this book shifts the focus to using colour in quilting.
Starting with a look at how to create good colour schemes using the colour wheel, the first part of the book is devoted to planning a quilt. Value and contrast, texture and scale, using different types of fabric (Predictable and Unpredictable) and how to distinguish your background and foreground fabrics are all explained. These sections are very useful containing practical advice without getting too technical. There are also many Practical
Advice sections which troubleshoot problems that you may encounter.
This is a project book and there are ten quilts to make. What is interesting is that they are all referred to in the descriptive text at the beginning of the book, so you are given an insight into the process of putting these quilts together. You can see how some of the quilts have had their colour schemes changed, how fabrics were auditioned or how the design was used with colour to keep the eyes moving to focal points. Having the finished quilts and understanding how the author changed things around to get there makes this an excellent
hands-on teaching tool. The quilts vary in colour and style so you have a good cross section of approaches to
choose from, including the Ugly Fabric Challenge, started with a call for ugly fabrics through Becky Goldsmiths blog and which lead to a colourful and unoffensive quilt. This book is a very practical approach to colour but what makes it worth having is that it is used according to its combination with all the other considerations of quilt making, so that you are looking at the process as a combination of parts.

Popular Patchwork

April 2015

As Becky Goldsmith points out in her introduction to this book, the importance of choosing the right colours for a project can often be daunting to the point of being scary, as with a quilt it seems so final - a poor combination can doom an otherwise pleasing design. Becky's bright exuberant book provides and enthusiastic and eminently practical guide to getting it right, and taking the dear factor out of the equation. The book is brilliantly written; Becky loves her subject, and all of the advice and guidance is friendly, readable, informal and - best of all - aimed at quilters specifically, rather than often repeated generic colour advice being lumped in with a few practical examples. Becky wants you to 'be the boss of colour' and take ownership of your choices. She challenges some accepted wisdom, such as working with colours you don't like, and a special mention must go to her Ugly Fabric Challenge project, borne of people sending her deliberately nasty fabrics to make something beautiful with! It work. We love this book; it's a delight to read and genuinely useful, and you should have it.