We absolutely adore the Quilter’s Planner. It provides the space we need plan and to dream… to get lost in a design while remembering that mid-week appointment. It allows us to build a sense of calm amidst the chaos, and is done so in and an incredibly inspiring way! The book itself offers pages of planning space + patterns, tips, and a true collaborative quilty spirit.
We’ve been partnering with The Quilter’s Planner for years, offering giveaways and thread sponsorships, and even having collaborated with many staff members as Aurifil Artisans and Designers. When editor Lorinda Davis brought the idea to collaborate on a curated thread set back in 2021, we jumped at the chance. She picked colors inspired by the Radiant Rainbow planner cover and the collection was released in January of this year!
Featuring 1148 (Light Jade), 1147 (Light Leaf Green), 2120 (Canary), 2530 (Blossom Pink), 2535 (Magenta), 1128 (Light Blue Violet), Radiant Dreams is a must-have for all quilters who love color.
Today, Lorinda is back to help us find news way to use those stunning colors to elevate our quilting and make a bigger impact!
Finishing a quilt top is a wonderful thing! But once you’ve completed that step, there is still another layer of artwork to add before your quilt is done — your beautiful quilting! Often, we try to blend our quilting thread to our project, but what if we want our quilting to really stand out?
Aurifil is the go-to thread here at the Quilter’s Planner, and with such a wide range of colors, they make it easy to choose a showstopper for your quilting.
Here are a five ideas to inspire you to make bold choices when it comes to your quilting threads:
1. Create hue contrast by going across the color wheel.
Colors across the color wheel from each other have the highest level of hue contrast and create a lot of vibrancy in your project. We had a lot of fun with this yellow/purple combo.
2. Change it up with a near-compliment combo.
Does going straight across the color wheel feel a little TOO vibrant for you? Try a near-compliment combination instead. This means you’ll go straight across the color wheel and hop one step over. In this example, we changed our thread from yellow to yellow/green to calm things down just a bit while still maintaining a fun contrast.
3. Use color values to create contrast.
Simply put, a color’s value is how light or dark it is. You can pair a light fabric with a darker thread (or vice versa) to make your quilting take center stage.
In this example, we have a monochromatic palette, but are using the slight value difference between the thread and fabric to make the quilting stand out just a bit.
4. Try pushing value contrast to the limit!
The most extreme version of value contrast would be black thread on white fabric or white thread on black fabric. This will give your project a VERY cool modern look. Try it with graffiti quilting on a pencil pouch!
5. Put a fully-saturated color on top of grey
Usually we reserve grey fabric for areas of a quilt that are meant to go unnoticed (backgrounds, backing, borders), but wouldn’t it be fun to change things up? Here, we allowed grey to be our focal fabric and used a vibrant shade of pink to quilt it, drawing even more attention to that space.
As you can tell, we love our quilting to stand out, which is why our Radiant Dreams Aurifil collection is full of fun, colorful threads, many of which are featured in this post!
If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out We Have This Thing With Color — simply click on the button below!
We used Aurifil 50wt thread for all samples; the colors (in the order shown) are 3817, 2120, 1147, 1148, 2600, and 2530.
HUGE thanks to Lorinda and the whole team at The Quilter’s Planner! Make sure to follow along with them via: Website | Instagram | Facebook
Thanks for sharing
L
Excellent study on colors and volumes. Truly outstanding.
Really helpful options – thanks!