Part Four - Second No-Fail Approach to Color

Remember I started these posts for stitchers who were unsure about choosing colors... I said there were two "NO FAIL" approaches...  The first was limit your color choices.  

Well the second  "NO FAIL"  approach is just the opposite.... USE EVERY COLOR!!!!  This block is an excellent example and was stitched by Cathy LaBath... She adores color but has written me repeatedly that she is horrible at picking out colors...

Yet to appease her thirst for bright colors she uses them with abandon  making dozens of these scrappy quilts..  They work because of the multitude of colors at random... You cannot fail making one of these quilts and the same approach is true applied to crazy quilting...

She's not comfortable choosing and controlling color but she doesn't let that stop her.. Cathy has her colorful scrappy quilts on her blog.

There are some people who have a joyous sense of color gone wild and are able to choose and control it.  I posted awhile back about two such people Lauri Burgesser and Allison Aller.  I keep a special drawer of  intense colors just to use on Lauri's blocks. I admire everything done by them... Their love of color and their use of vibrant colors add energy to everything they create.

 Two other stitchers who consistently make wonderful use of vibrant colors are Lorraine Stobie and Nikki Lee Seavy...  Not only are they skilled stitchers, both have Esty shops where they sell supplies  ablaze with color. Nikki Lee Seavey sells hand dyed laces  and Lorraine sells hand dyed threads. 

One of the newer members of CQI whom I have been watching is Pamela Pincha-Wagener   who picked these colors for her blocks in the Goldwork 3 RR... She wrote that she has never made a pastel block...  I've asked her  if I can work on her last block in this RR just because the colors are so yummy and would be a real challenge for me...

Probably the most famous crazy quilter for using "Color Gone Wild' is Martha Greene of Oklahoma. She refers to herself as using the "roadside carnival" approach..  She has participated in many exhibitions and won numerous awards and has been an Artist-in-residence at Oklahoma State University for 15 years.  I met and watched her work in Colorado a year ago.. She started with a pile of brilliantly-colored scraps and picked them and stitched them completely at random... She often teaches workshops around the country.. Unfortunately I could not find a website nor web address for her...

So if you love color and have been hesitant to plunge ahead, you might want to experiment with this approach... A word of caution would be to start with solid colors or use prints with a very tiny pattern.  This ensures that your fancy stitching will show up.  Then once you have your colorful block sewn, get out your stash of threads and start pulling  lots and lots colors...

If  making a block of every color and working with thread of every color is too much for you on your first color adventure, try using threads of every color on  black blocks. Here is a RR block stitched several years back by Jo Newsham of NZ using lots of intense color on a black background.

Cathy Kizerian's CQJP project is going to be spectacular.  She is using the intense colors in a piece of vintage needlepoint and using them for fancy stitching on black crazy quilted blocks.. It is unassembled at this point and pinned to her wall. She   has just a few more to go...

If these people had a neighborhood, it should look like this!