Stuart's Surgery - Each Month Stuart Hillard Answers Your Quilty Questions!
Popular Patchwork|February 2018

Karen from Somerset emailed me recently with a dilemma I think most of us have experienced at some point in our quilting lives: “What are neutral colours and how do I use them?” Great question Karen, let’s see if we can give you a definitive answer…

Stuart's Surgery - Each Month Stuart Hillard Answers Your Quilty Questions!

Neutrals are essentially ‘without colour’. Look at any colour wheel and you will see all the colours of the rainbow, from red through to deepest purple but there’s no brown, beige, cream, black, grey or white. These are the ‘neutral tones’ which, despite being colours when you open a pack of crayons, are considered ‘without colour’ in the context of interior design. Many of us start our quilting journeys with a class, friend, or magazine to inspire us and we very quickly pick up that neutrals are for the background of a quilt and their role is to make ‘proper colours’ stand out. Bring on the white-on-white prints, the cream and tan ditsy prints and, if you’re a modern quilter, lots of grey solids. For many of us, the lesson ends here, we understand what neutrals are and what they do. I’m being a bit of a devil’s advocate here... can you tell? You see, I think there is an awful lot more scope for neutral fabrics if we think a little more broadly and rock the boat a little.

Let’s start by looking at the neutrals that we know and love... if you’ve got a stash anything like mine you can pull a handful of white-on-white prints and lay them next to each other. 

This story is from the February 2018 edition of Popular Patchwork.

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This story is from the February 2018 edition of Popular Patchwork.

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