Gradients in Quilting

Johanna Masko talked to our guild about how to think about, design, and operationalize gradients in our quilting. Use of gradation is a prominent part of modern quilting, and there are a lot of ways to think about it. One is the paint chip aisle at the hardware store. There each individual chip shows a particular starting color, and then what happens when you add more and more white to it, or conversely more and more black. This is a familiar and maybe one could say conventional way to look at gradation. Masko advocates thinking about it more broadly--she uses gradents in the background of this quilt, which moves across a large area, and then in each of the dresden plates, she uses it more subtly. I really like the details of her design process, and what she thought about as she was designing this and other quilts that she has made. A couple of take aways from her lecture for me was to use the color apps that are available in order to better train my eye to correctly identify the gradient--so if I want to incorporate it that I can do it right. The other was that when developing a quilt, to think about if this will be a part of the design or not, to think more intentionally about design, and to figure out not only where you are going, but where you want to go. Once again, I feel like the more I learn the less I know--that I figure out more of what I didn't know but am also more aware of the vastness of what there is to know.