Quilt Designs with Multiple Colors

When you add the element of quilting to the surface of your quilts, you can be adding a lot more than simply a stitch line. You can add color, and that color can be very appropriate to the piece, or it can really detract, so it's important to really think and understand how that color is going to affect your quilt. One of the best ways to do that is to do what I call dribbling. That simply means that when you choose a thread color, that you actually unwrap that thread, and you dribble it onto the surface of the quilt, and once that is dribbled on there, you press it down, and you see how that new color affects the color that it's going down on. It's important that we draw attention to what we wanna draw attention to, and that we don't draw attention to what we don't wanna draw attention to.

Any time we use a contrasting color, we heighten the attention in that area. So when we look at this block, we have a wonderful yellow green fabric, and we have a design that's stitched in black, and that black is a high contrast. When stitching in the negative space, I went with a thread that matched the color better, the color of the fabric, because I didn't want the background stitching to get a lot of attention. I wanted the motif that I stitched to get the attention. When we look at a design like this, I don't like to mark.

I will doodle something first to get a feel for it, but I wanna kind of walk through what's happening in this design so that you can understand that if you're looking at the design as a whole, it feels and looks very complex, but if you look at it as its parts and pieces, you can understand that it's much easier. So I began by simply drawing with my machine the outside shape with a swirl, and these three little curves, and finish, and that gave me the shape of the whole piece. I went back in, and added this very fine line next to this side, and then came back and put in this gentle curve all the way down. Then I came up, and added this empty long shape, which I then went back in and filled with circles. Once that was done, I added this wonderful little shape to the outside edge, doubled back up, and put a very narrow swirl in each of these curved areas.

So when you look at the little parts, it's not nearly as complex as the whole. It's how all of those little parts together end up looking to give you this really complex design. Now, if I want that quilting to really show up, here's that contrasting color. I need to make sure that I'm putting it in an area where this contrast is not going to compete with other contrasts that are present on the quilt. So again, this would be put in something that's very simple.

Let's say I simply took some solid fabrics, and sewed them together with gentle curves, and I have all these wonderful areas of solid fabric. This would be wonderful to then quilt in one of those areas. If I were doing it, and the quilt had lots of different colors in it, I could match the thread to each color, or what's really fun is to use the color next to it. So if this section is red, and the next section is violet, put violet in the red, and if next to the violet is blue violet, put blue violet in the violet, so that we're continuing with a relationship that we already have rather than bringing in lots of new contrasts. Now, I like to quilt in color, and I don't mind changing my thread constantly.

Different machines have different ease, or difficulty, with threading and changing out the bobbin. I always match my bobbin thread to my top thread. When I do that, I don't have to worry about tension. And I know that it's nice to have really good tension. It makes the stitch sturdier.

However, sometimes when you're stitching really, really fast, and you're going in circles, the tension gets a little bit off. I don't want the bottom thread of a different color pulled to the surface, or the top thread of a different color pulled to the back, and that happens sometimes. So if my threads match color, then I don't have to worry about that. Here I've done a very large design in a contrasting color, so the fabric itself is this wonderful orange, and I stitched this swirly leaf design in green. I wanted it to be green, 'cause it's a leaf.

I went over that line several times so that it was thick. I could have used a thicker thread, but frankly, I didn't have a thicker thread, and so I just double it up. When I was finished with the leaves, I went in with another different color of thread, this happens to be a light violet, and I filled in the negative space. The design that I used in the negative space is linear. This design of the leaf is somewhat linear, but the lines end in very nice curves, so there's a great juxtaposition between the two.

The light violet, though it is a different color from the orange, doesn't get a whole lot of attention, and the reason it doesn't is because it's a tone. It means it's somewhat dirty. It's not a clear, bright color. And tones tend to recede better than pure hues. On this piece, my fabric was very bright and intense, this wonderful yellow green, and so I knew that I needed to add some contrast in there to really get you to be able to see the wonderful design.

And this has a three color change. The first color that I laid down was the actual green of the leaves, so I simply came in, and did the leaf, and kept going, and did all of the leaves in green. Then I changed my thread color to turquoise, and I doubled over the vine, and added the veins to each of the leaves, and when I was done, I changed my thread color to this violet, and added the little berries to the vine. Now, if you're doing this on the border of a queen-sized quilt, it might seem daunting. However, if you're gonna do this design all in one color, it doesn't take a whole lot more time to change your thread color a total of three times, and do the same design.

Everybody thinks, "Oh, but that's gonna take so much longer." It doesn't, it's just the thread change that you have to do. You were gonna do the stitching anyway. I really, really like to make designs that go with each other, or work with each other, and I'll come up with a design that I can use in simple blocks, and then I'll come up with a design that I can use in the border that goes along with that first design. So here's a piece that I could use in a simple block. I would not use this in a highly pieced block, but if I did a quilt something like "A Trip Around the World," or anything that has a pieced block with a setting block, and that setting block doesn't have any piecing in it, I could put this design in that setting block, and it wouldn't deter or detract too much from the pieced block.

But I wouldn't quilt this all over the surface of a pieced block, because that would push all of those planes together that are present in the pieced block, and make it look flat and non-dimensional. For this one, I started with the red, and basically what you're gonna be doing is you're gonna choose the fabric, the thread color to start with that is gonna define your motif. So the red is how I drew the flower, started with the circle of the flower, did the petals, used a loop de loop to get to where I wanted to make the next flower. After all the flowers were done, I switched colors, and I moved to the yellow. And the yellow I used to make the center of each flower, to add the texture around the centers, and then loop de looped to the next flower.

Took the yellow thread out, and put in the turquoise, and added the little gentle curves inside the center, added the little texture inside the petals, and loop de looped from flower to flower. Then, I came up with a border design that went with that flower design, and the only thing that they're sharing is the flower. It's still a five-petaled flower that's fat, and then pointy, and it's red, so again I started with red, I started here at the bottom, put in my stem, did the center, added the petals, came back down, stitched over, and did it again. When my row of red flowers was done, and this could be done on the whole border of a quilt, then I switched the thread color to the green, and I came in and I added all the tall grasses, and the leaves on the stem, so tall grasses, leaves on the stem, did the whole thing. Then I switched to the yellow, or the goldenrod, went over the stem again, added some interest to the leaves, put in some swirlies, added some interest to the petals, and then filled the negative space of the sky with what I call dancing fireflies, or dragonflies, or whatever.

It's simply flourishes with loop de loops that fills in that space, but adds a sense of whimsy to the piece. So this is simply three different colors of thread, so is this, but they're not necessarily the same three colors. What makes them unified is that red flower, and that they're all mostly pure hues. Finally, I've got a very ornate design here, and this is a fan. The fan original shape is here, and then it has a loop de loop on the bottom, and then it's linked by loop de loops to the next fan.

Once the red fans were laid down, the yellow came next, and it divided the segments of the fan, loop de looped to the next fan, then the green came in, and the green added the detail, and loop de looped to the next fan. Here we have a companion piece, and we repeated a little bit of the elements from here, but it's not an exact replication. However, the color is the same, so the fact that it's a little different still makes them okay together. So here, I simply came in, and did this movement, and then made the tops and the bottoms, and the tops and the bottoms of each fan. Once that was done, I came back in and put the gentle curve on here.

The next thing was the yellow thread, and it divided the fans, the sections in the fan, and then I echoed that first half circle. The red came next, and it did the detail in the fan, and then I again went around those half circles, and then I came back with the green thread, and filled in the negative space with a stipple. So yes, it's a very complex design, but not that much more complex done in multiple colors than it would be all done in one color, and those multiple colors help to define each portion of the design, and make it more interesting. So consider quilting with lots of different colors the next time you start a quilt. I think you'll really enjoy it, and I think you'll be very pleased with the results.