Choosing Between Black and White Quilt Backgrounds

We quilters spend a lot of time choosing the fabrics for our quilts. In fact, a lot of us have so many fabrics, we don't know what to do with them. But we rarely spend as much time thinking about the negative space or the backgrounds that we choose for our quilts. And that negative space can be just as important as the space that occupies the design area. So when we choose a background, we need to make sure that that background is going to behave in a way that we can expect it to.

Often our choices are either black or white, sometimes we use gray and sometimes we use light or dark versions of the colors that we're using in the quilt. I wanna talk a little bit about that choice of black and white. When we look at this piece right here, we can see that we have lots of bright colors and then we have a white background and a black border. What happens when we use white with bright is that a competition gets formed. The white is the brightest, lightest inherent valued color or entity that we use, and it wants to compete with every other color.

It wants to come forward. And so to make it go back, we have to really quilt it heavily. So it's only a good choice if we know that we're going to quilt our background very, very heavily. Otherwise, black is a better choice. When we look at this quilt versus this quilt, on this one we can see that the colors are really coming forward.

They're just jumping off the surface. Black allows bright colors to do that. It sits in the negative space really nicely and it doesn't have to be quilted quite as heavily. Black and white will also affect how the colors look sizewise. When we look at this piece, I've split the background so that part of it is white and part is black.

And then those bright colors are going from either black into white or white into black. When we look at them, we can actually see a change, a physical change in size. Here we have this red strip, and as it goes into the white, it looks like it's thinner. And it's actually the same exact size as it is over here. Whereas here we have this blue strip and it looks smaller in the white, but when it goes into the black, it looks larger.

The negative space will really affect the colors and really affect the things that are in positive space. Finally, sometimes we're not using bright colors. We're using tones or shades or tints. In this piece we have mostly shades and those are our colors that have black or gray added in. There are tones in here also.

And they're being affected differently by the white and the gray. Here you can actually see a crisper line against the white. Whereas here, those grayed out colors, just move into that gray or dark black or dark gray or black fabric. So here, we're gonna see a nice line or demarcation where the beginning of negative space begins and positive space is. So for tones and shades, white is a really good option, whereas the gray or the black is not.

So next time when you're choosing the fabrics for your quilt, pay some really good attention to the fabric that you choose for negative space and choose one that's going to help the positive space look the way you want it to and give you the opportunity to quilt the way you want to also.