My ColorCraft Workshop Experience with Toad & Sew

I had the pleasure of attending the PMQG Workshop with Taylor Krz of Toad & Sew on September 20th.  I wasn't sure what to expect from "ColorCraft: Discovering Inspiration and Crafting Your Palette", but I signed up because playing with color is one of my favorite things.  I had so much fun and left with some fabulous tools!  

We used a variety of prompts from a huge list Taylor provided to locate many different images in Pinterest that caught our eye and organized them on our Pinterest board.  I pinned images of the aurora borealis, stained glass, icy landscapes, and a neon unicorn.  I decided to start with this rainbowy ocean critters image from artist Wayne Minnis.  

Another free-to-use site auto-selected colors from the image.  Taylor showed us how to modify the auto-selected colors to ensure we had a nice and balanced range of values.  One of my major challenges in quilting is that I love the bright mid-value fabrics and often forget how lights and darks make my faves shine.  

Finally, a different website allowed you to match your selected colors to commercially available solids from many companies.  We then auditioned color placement in different quilt pattern designs, including Taylor's.  I tend to dive immediately into cutting fabric and I still regret this when looking at some of my quilts.  The ability to see how colors will look together and Taylor's examples about how you can highlight specific motifs of a quilt design with fabric selection was quite helpful.  It is far quicker (and much cheaper) to move a color with a few clicks then cutting fabric and playing on the design wall.

I plan to use Taylor's ColorCraft method to explore new color combos and generate ideas when I'm stuck in a rut.  Check out her quilt designs and get a sense of her ColorCraft at https://www.toadandsew.com/.

-Kory Keller, PMQG member and Vice-President