Several years ago, I decided to explore the world of fabric dyeing. It was by dyeing fabrics that I really learned about color and the difference between yellow-green and blue-green.
When mixing the colors to make the dye, the resulting colors suddenly make more sense, and now, many yards of dyed fabric later, I find it easier to choose colors for a quilt.
When you actually see what color results from mixing 1/4 yellow and 3/4 red versus 1/2 yellow and 1/2 red, it all makes more sense.
What’s interesting is that when I took the class, the teacher provided the dye to make the colors you see in the fabric swatches below. I realized that red was a magenta color, rather than what I normally see as red. (The teacher called him fuscia).
And the blue was more turquoise than traditional blue. But, since everything was new to me anyway, I didn’t really question the differences.
It was only today, when I was once again pondering color, that I found some kind of explanation for the difference. Not that this is a complete explanation, but it does offer an idea.
It turns out that this guy named Dr. Herbert Ives directed AT & T’s television research during the 1920s and 1930s. Herbert’s interest in color began at an early age, as his father invented the techniques for color photography and halftone process. These techniques made possible the printing of photographs in newspapers and magazines.
And Herbert created a color wheel made up of three “pure” colors. The true meaning of all of this is that fabric dyes use the Ives color wheel, as became apparent when I took the fabric dyeing class.
The three pure colors are: magenta, turquoise, and yellow. The vibrancy of these colors individually is remarkable, and when mixed together in specific formulas, they create the most powerful and beautiful colors out there.
Quilts made primarily from these pure colors immediately catch the eye, whether they’re on display at a quilt show or in your home.
When choosing colors for a quilt, you may want to keep in mind that bold colors can affect the mood of the people who look at them. If you are making a quilt for a child who is already at a high level of activity, you may not want to do it with pure colors because they would stimulate the child even more.
However, if you have a dull and boring room, like the full brown I had in my living room many years ago, adding pure colors will brighten the room. In my case, a truck full of pure colors would probably have needed to dominate brown.
These pure colors, and their variations, are found in nature, and it is interesting to note that whether the colors are tints or shades depends on the season. I know, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.
But it works this way. A tint includes all colors between white and the true pure color. Pastels are good examples of tints, and pastels are the colors of spring: robin’s egg blue, peach, apricot, mint green, etc.
When you add black to a pure color, you get a hue of the color. As you can imagine, shadows are the colors of fall. When you add black to red, you get a rust color – shades of autumn leaves preparing to fall from trees.
A hue is what you get when you add gray (not black) to a pure color. These are the colors of winter and are generally calming colors. These colors are ideal for bedrooms and toddler quilts.
The real question in my mind is “who created the more ‘traditional’ color wheel? And why?”