A Primer on Value
In my book Open your Heart with Quilting, I briefly discuss value in relation to designing a quilt. The diagrams in the book should be helpful if you trust that value is often more important than color in quilt design, but if you need more reassurance of the importance of value, take a look at the examples and exercises below. This page exists as an extension of the book and is meant to help new quilters gain confidence in using value. All examples were created using Electric Quilt version 5. (Yes, I’m a slacker – I haven’t upgraded to version 6 yet!)
Dark? Medium? Light?
Like with most aspects of quilting, the first thing to do is relax! There really are no quilt police and if you like how something looks, that’s all that matters. Really!
If that doesn’t help, look at it this way – you have managed to dress yourself since you were quite small. You know how to put together an outfit that looks good. You have probably decorated and furnished a home (or at least a room) of your own, and you managed to create a space you love and feel comfortable in.
Still worried? Ok, even if you can’t dress yourself or a room attractively, there is still hope! Some very simple principles of design can help you put together values in an attractive way. We will discuss those here.
I know I said this on my color page too, but it’s true of every aspect of quilting and it bears repeating!
Have you ever looked at a quilt and thought it looked pretty boring. Ho hum. Unexciting. The colors might be pretty, the fabric might have good visual texture, but overall, the quilt just lacks… something.
As I mention in Open your Heart with Quilting, without contrasting values in your quilt, it will appear flat and dull. No matter how vibrant the color scheme, or complex the patchwork, if the quilt does not use different values of fabrics, it will be lifeless and monotonous. Colors that look fine up close may blur when viewed at a distance – for example from across the room at a quilt show, or even hanging on the wall in your home.
In the book I provided simple gray scale pictures to show value, but there is only so much to be gained by looking at black, white and gray blocks. On this page I offer a selection of quilts and blocks designed in Electric Quilt 5 that show both bad and good examples of the use of value.
Some Examples
For these examples, I have designed each block in color and also in gray scale so you can see how the same blocks can look different depending on the value you choose and where you place them.
Example 1:
The colored block is bright and cheerful, but when you look at it in gray scale you can see that the teal and dark pink are too close in value. They just don’t have enough contrast to make the star stand out from a distance.
Example 2:
In this example the colored block is subdued and pretty (and uses some of my favorite colors!) and when you look at it in gray scale the star does stand out nicely. But the surrounding patches (the greens and pale purples) blend together and are lost.
Example 3:
The sea-blue and orange color scheme is eye-catching, but again, in gray scale the values are all too close together. They basically wash out.
Example 4:
This is another example of a subdued block. In color is looks warm and inviting, but in gray scale the pale purple star is completely lost and blends too closely with the green blocks.
Example 5:
Again, the block on the left uses pretty colors, nice light pastels that might be good for a little girl’s room. But viewed as value only, you can see that the green and pink blend together completely and thus the star pattern is invisible. It ends up looking like just a plain old nine-patch!
Example 6:
This example is much better than all of the preceding ones. The colors stand out nicely and so do the values. The star is visible, the corner and center blocks are visible and the only thing I might change would be the triangles around the center block or the ones on the outside. Let’s take a look at that…
Example 7:
I think we finally have a block that works on all levels, assuming you like the colors!
I’m going to give it one more tweak. I want to add more warmth and so replaced the pale green with orange. I think this gives it a nice autumn look. And in the gray scale value version it definitely works.
Let’s take a look at a quilt made from this block. In color, it looks fine. The stars are well defined, the square-in-a-square effect in the center of each block stands out, and the sashing we’ve added adds extra spark and helps your eye move around the quilt.
And in black and white? It still looks great! The stars are still visible, the square-in-a-square is still defined, and the sashing is still doing its job.
So how can you do this yourself?
Seeing is Believing
When trying to determine what value a given fabric has, it is helpful to have a tool called a ruby beholder. This is a fancy name for a piece of clear red plastic that you can look at your fabrics through. Even red Plexiglases or cellophane will work. This item, designed by Patricia Maixner Magaret and Donna Ingram Slusser, cancels out the color and leaves you seeing just the value.
Of course, looking at one fabric in isolation won’t tell you its relative value compared to other fabrics, so it is helpful to arrange all or at least several of the fabrics you are auditioning and look at them together. The result may surprise you!
Even though you may be completely in love with that pink and white polka dotted fabric, the pink may not be dark enough to counter the white dots and the whole piece reads light, when in fact you need a medium. (This happened to me. I was very unhappy because I discovered this only after I had sewn several blocks! They had to be put aside for a future project.)
Ruby beholders don’t work as well on fabrics with a lot of red in them (reds, pinks, and purples), but for those colors, you can use a piece of green plastic or cellophane. (I have searched high and low for a tool like this with an actual name, but all I have been able to find is the rather generically named “value finder”, although I have heard it called an “emerald beholder”.)
There are other ways to see the value of fabrics.
- Make a sample block of your selected fabrics (just gluing or pinning the pieces to paper works) and then photocopy the block to see it in black and white.
- Look at it through the lens of your digital camera with the camera adjusted to show black and white.
- Take black and white digital photos and view them on your computer next to color photos of the same block to see how they compare, as we did in the examples above.
- If you design in Electric Quilt or some other program, save your block patterns as bitmaps (.BMP) and then convert them to black and white or gray scale using a program like Photoshop or Gimp.
A fun exercise in value placement
This works best with a very simple block that uses only dark, medium, and light tones. Photocopy your block pattern (if it is in color), or draw your block in black and white, shading the medium pieces gray.
Sort your chosen fabrics by value – light, medium, and dark. (You can use scraps for this if you don’t want to cut your “good” fabric. In fact this works best as a scrappy exercise.)
Put each value in a labeled paper bag (all lights in one bag, mediums in another and so on) and pull out the values you need as you need them. A light and a dark, a light and a medium, two darks – whatever you need to create your block. Pay no attention to color – only value matters for this game.
Assemble at least four blocks this way before you start fretting that something “doesn’t go”. Just put them together and trust that it will be ok. When you are done, put your four blocks together. What do you think?
If you did your value sorting correctly, it should be a visually pleasing (albeit very small) quilt. My friend Jane uses up her scraps this way. She cuts them to size, sorts them by value and then just pulls out a dark or a light or a medium as she needs it depending on the block she is making. Her scrappy quilts are invariably beautiful. And yours will be too!
