Has your quilt group ever examined your collectively amassed fabric scraps (we save our scraps for 'doggie' beds)?  Yesterday, our quilt group did just that. Interesting!!! I guided the process during a workshop on colour theory and below are a few of the results.

Value: I asked the group to lay out each pile of colour swatches from light to dark. Wow! There were almost no light values and very few darks. Most colour swatches could be classified as medium values.
Adding gray to a colour creates a tone. There were very few examples of tones either and they were mostly mauve.

Colours in our stashes: The blue scrap pile was the largest followed by the red and green piles. The orange pile contained the fewest fabric swatches and yellow was limited too.

Colour Schemes in Print Fabrics: Print pieces were also examined to see if specific colour schemes were used in the fabric's design. We considered monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triad, and polychromatic colour schemes.  While there were a lot of fabrics in the monochromatic, analogous and complementary colour schemes there was only one fabric using a split complementary colour scheme and a few fabrics using the triad. Two fabrics were identified as using a polychromatic colour scheme.

Oh my goodness we are in love with the red-green complementary combination. All but one fabric in this category had the red-green colour scheme. These were not Christmas prints but they contained various values including a favored dusty rose and greyed green.

Conclusions: The quilt group uses a lot of medium values in our quilts and let me tell you there are beautiful quilts being made. If we had more value variety through lights, darks and tones and these can be hard to come by in some fabric stores, we would have even more choices for quilt making. We realized it was helpful to use a colour-tool or colour-wheel to help identify these values in the various colours.
Colour theory - I can never get enough of it. The more I learn the more I want to experiment. More on split-complements to follow.