A lesson on Value

A lot of readers mentioned that they wanted to know more about working with value.  Here is the way that I teach it:

Choose your assortment of fabrics.

Move the light fabrics to the left and the dark fabrics to the right.  All of the ones left down the middle are medium tones.

Now divide the mediums into lights and darks and keep them together at the bottom of your area.

Now this picture is what you don't want to do.  You don't want your lightest lights with the darkest darks because that leaves all of the mediums together and they will not contrast with each other.

This is what you do want to do, move the lightest darks up to match with the lightest lights.

Move the darkest darks to match up with the darkest lights.

As I am working I will make some low contrast pairs and a few high contrast pairs too so that I have movement in my design.  Mostly you want the contrast between the light value and dark value to be easily seen.  If you go back to the post with the triangle quilt on the design wall I think you will be able to pick out the blocks with the low contrast triangles.

I have the first 7 rows sewn together on the first triangle quilt so I'm half way there sewing the vertical seams.