QuiltCon Class with Weeks Ringle

I took two classes at QuiltCon. The first one was Rediscovering Your Stash with Weeks Ringle. On Pat Sloan's podcast I had heard them talk about Weeks' magic when she works with hard to match fabrics in someone's stash  so I knew it would be an interesting class.

At the beginning of the session, we talked about color and its importance. Rather than thinking in terms of light/medium/dark fabric, Weeks encouraged us to realize the importance of contrast. When deciding on a background fabric, the hue shouldn't be found in any of the other fabrics selected for the quilt top. The same value in a different saturation makes the fabrics pop. Also, when determining what fabrics go together, think in terms on commonality i.e., not matching.

Here's a photo of a quilt that will be in the next issue of Modern Quilts Illustrated. You can see each of the colors very vividly.

And here's a close up of another quilt using Liberty of London fabrics. Weeks says every quilt needs contrast. As you can see, the drab makes the bright triangles pop with the contrast.

After we talked about color, we each selected one fabric from our stash that either we really didn't like or we didn't know what to do with it. We put them on a table and Weeks teamed us up with the owner of another fabric on the table.My fabric is the bold huge print on the right - I love it but I'm not sure how to use it. My partner had the alligator print (okay, maybe it's really a crocodile - I'm not sure!).

At this point, we were to use our stash and select 8-10 fabrics that would allow the huge print and the alligators to be used in a single quilt top. Weeks taught us to consider everything in our stash as an option, then whittle it down. How to do that?  Look for commonalities - not matchy matchy. We chose the roundness of the berries and the long curved line of the stems and alligators' tails.

It's a very interesting process that certainly has taught me to look at fabric differently. For more information on the exercise, check out issue 7 of Modern Quilts Illustrated. It makes for a fascinating read!