Have you seen Kathy Doughty's newest book, Making Quilts? If not, you should look for it!

Kathy is one of my favorite quilting friends, although I don't get to see her often. She owns Material Obsession, a quilt shop in Sydney, Australia. She also writes a great blog! There is a link to the Material Obsession blog in the column at right, or you can click here. 

Making Quilts was originally published by Quiltmania, in France. The text is in both French and English making the book bigger because of the extra pages required for both languages. In the same way that books from the US are often more expensive overseas, that book was more expensive here in the US—but not any more!

Luckily for us, Making Quilts has been re-issued (in English only) by Stash Books! You can find it at your local quilt shop, from Amazon, or from C&T. 

Kathy has a fearless way of combining color and pattern—in quilts, in her wardrobe, in her home. The chair below is one that she showed on her blog a while back. She had it recoverd in that great fabric to go in her home. I want to go sit in that chair, in that room, and soak in the color!

Kathy sometimes teaches in the US. If you ever get a chance to take a class from her, you won't be disappointed. Until then, you might want to check out her book!

When you look at all the fabric from my recent shopping trip together…

…did you see a Christmas quilt? It's there:

And it's even better with the aquas added to the mix.

I didn't photograph these with the dotted mushroom fabric, but it would fit right in.

You might wonder if I 'saw' a Christmas quilt as I was buying these fabrics. No, I did not. It's more that the fabric I bought is a tiny representation of what is mostly in my stash. By combining these in different ways, I could build a huge variety of quilts. Of course, I would want to add to these because more is better :-).

I go through periods where I buy black/white prints in larger numbers. My recent shopping trip was no exception…

I also bought several gray prints. I separated the cleaner b/w prints from the gray prints into the two stacks you see above. (There's more on 'clarity' at the bottom of this post.)

I don't have a project in mind for them, but I know that I could make a quilt with just these neutral fabrics or I could add color to them.

I thought you might like to see how some of the other new fabrics could mash up with the b/w stack and the gray stack.

Here are the greens with the b/w stack…

…and the same greens with the gray stack.

The clarity of the greens shift subtlely depending on which stack they are paired with. With the cleaner b/w prints, the greens look a bit brighter to my eye. The grays make the greens look a little duller.

The same thing happens with the yellows and oranges…

I think that a lot of the problems quilters have with 'color' might begin with clarity issues. So many of us have both clear and gray colors in our stash. Some of them look nice together but other combinations look so bad that they make your teeth hurt.

The key to combining clear and gray colors comes from understanding how they work together. In general, gray colors recede and clear colors come forward. Combining the two can give your quilts more visual dimension. But, as you well know, you can't throw just any colors together and expect them to be  wonderful. 

Colors live on a sliding scale, from clear to gray. Colors at the far ends of this spectrum are harder to use together (imagine lime green with civil war pink—yuck). You will be more successful if you combine colors closer to each other on this sliding clarity scale. 

So why do the colors (in the photos above) work with both the b/w prints and the gray prints? In these cases, the black/white and the grays are neutral foils for the colors. The cleanness, or grayness, of the neutral stacks have an effect on the clarity of the colors next to them.

Color, value, clarity—all are relative. Every color is effected by what it is next to. Context counts.

I hope that makes sense :-). I've been writing about this very thing in the color manuscript for two days!

In the past few years, there have been some really nice prints that are designed to be used from selvage to selvage. I don't buy them all but this one, with the birds and the dots, is one I couldn't pass up. I like the collaged look of it. The birds only run along one selvage edge. I may end up using it on the back of a quilt which is fine. I like the back to be fun, too! (This is by Carrie Bloomston, Collage collection, for Such Designs.)

I don't use many prints with 'things' on them in but that doesn't mean I never buy 'thing' fabric. I just don't buy much of it.  

I bought the mushroom print because of an art professor (Mary) that I took printmaking from many years ago. She would sometimes talk about "art" that included polka-dot mushrooms made by crafters. I don't remember her being ugly about it—more that you shouldn't rely on kitsch in art.

I think about Mary every time I see dotted mushrooms :-). I think it would be fun to sneak a bit of this fabric into my quilts. Just because.

In the black and white section of the store I found more graduated prints. The gray zigzag is dark at both selvages, light at the fold. The two dots are stripe-y. I have no idea where I will use them, but these are good to have in the stash because they are rare.

And then I bought 1-1/2 yards of this: 

I do not know why I like it. I'll probably use it on a quilt back—or not. Who knows. The print feels big, the lamps (or onions? or beads?) are 2-1/2" wide. It is designed by Jane Dixon, the collection is called Poppy Modern, for Andover.

Wait… poppy? How about that! Turned upside down it does look like poppy seed heads—except that I still see the hanging lamps.

FYI: If you see any of these fabrics you like, contact The Quilt Asylum. They may have more.